Natural History

Thylacoleo carnifex, the "marsupial lion," is just a big cat with a pouch, according to creationists. And I guess Sylvester was right-- the kangaroo is just a giant mouse with a pouch!

One big problem that creationists have is biogeography.

If all animal life on earth is derived from animals that were on the  Noah’s Ark, why is it that the place where it went aground, supposedly Mt. Ararat, Turkey,  isn’t the greatest biodiversity hot spot? This mountain would have been the place where all life would have begun to repopulate the earth, and it is likely that more species would be found near the point of origin than places thousands of miles away– like Brazil, a place Noah never even heard of!

The other big problem is that there are no marsupials in Mesopotamia.  Most marsupials are in Australia, and many are in Central and South America.  And there is one species that is found north of the Rio Grande in North America. If these animals were on the Ark, why didn’t they populate any place outside of Australia or the Americas?

Well, the creationists thought this one through.

Remember, creationists usually claim that Noah didn’t actually have one of every species on the Ark.  That would be too silly. How could Noah have put that many species on a boat?  No. Noah put two of every “kind.”  A kind is deliberately nebulous term, but in an essence, it is not a species. It includes like species, but unlike other taxonomic groupings, like species or genera or order or kingdom, there are no levels of a kind. It can group together whatever species it wants. It is entirely up to the creationist to group species into kinds.

And that’s exactly how they deal with the marsupial problem.

On the site Revolution Against Evolution, an author named Robert Byers groups together the placentals with the marsupials that look like them into the same kind. The marsupial traits are just adaptations that “evolved” after the flood. Remember, creationists often believe in evolution within kinds, but a kind can’t become something else. Byers explains how this works:

Creation theory has an equal and even more plausible explanation for the seeming anomaly marsupial concentration and exclusivity of Australia in the present and past as indicated by the fossil record. In addition, an equal and also more plausible explanation exists for similar animal groupings in the past, shown in the fossil record, who looked similar to present and past creatures elsewhere but said to be unrelated by modern science. This second matter is not so well known by the public and even well-read creationists.

Present evolutionary biology and palaeontology contends that over great lengths of time natural selection brought about same kind of creatures at different times on different parts of the world from totally unrelated non descript rodent like creatures. These include bear, dog, cat, horse, and elephant shaped creatures with no biological relation whatsoever evolved in numerous places around the world from different ancestral tiny creatures. They call it called convergent evolution. This is a great theme in evolutionary biology.

Creationists can confidently present a better argument than before for the suitability of present and past animal distribution based on a model accepting the Biblical flood and its aftermath animal dispersal.

The fossil record shows same shaped creatures in different areas of the world with minor differences. These creatures while shaped like other creatures in the world have minor similarities to each other in each particular area that they live in. And so a bear and cat shaped creature would have a similar ear bone arrangement or foot arrangement in that area. And while evolution will say that the ear or foot arrangement indicates common ancestry, creation theory can on contrary contend these creatures are just bears and cats the same as elsewhere who due to some influence in the area, adapted some minor ear or foot arrangement. All bear and cat creatures descended from the pairs from the Ark.

This all leads to the seeming anomaly of Australia with its exclusive marsupial fauna. Australia is not an aberrant anomaly but rather a revelation of the true story or equation of post flood animal migration and adaptation.

These minor similarities of marsupials and bone structures in the creatures of Australia are irrelevant as to their origin and ancestral relationship. The origin and relationship of these creatures is the same as all creatures similarly shaped elsewhere on the earth now or in the past. Marsupial dogs and cats are the same kinds as regular dogs and cats, and likewise related to dogs and cats (in the fossil record but now extinct) also with minor regional body differences that lived in certain places on earth.

Only the marsupial mole, same as the placental mole elsewhere hints at the common adaptations after the flood.

The marsupial creatures of Australia are the absolute same ones as elsewhere that filled the earth after the flood. The same body type is the evidence of ancestry and not minor matters as reproduction. The present attempt of science to group animals and their relationships by reproduction methods or minor bone structures has been the error of modern evolutionary biology and palaeontology.

To the organized creationist community I make this contribution believing that it is true. Yet also believing a previous problem can be turned into an exciting example to creationists, Christians, and the scientific world how faith in the accuracy of the Bible and study of what data there is can place creation theory in the forefront and eye to eye with the truth of origins with anybody.

Now. This is about as valid as the old Sylvester cartoons in which he encounters a baby kangaroo while out mousing. Sylvester then assumes he’s come across the largest mouse in the world.

Source.

The insanity of this statement really is amazing.

Yes. There are marsupials that look like placentals.  The marsupial moles look like placental golden moles. And the thylacine looked like a species of wild dog, even though it behaved more like a cat and was restricted to hunting much smaller prey than a similar-sized placental wild dog.

But to say that the thylacine was the same kind as the dogs in the order Carnivora totally denudes the concept of kind. Genetic evidence, which another big problem for creationists, clearly shows that placental mammals and marsupials split a very long time ago. The current thinking is that placentals and marsupials diverged 160-180 million years ago. That’s a long time ago.

If we look at the actual evidence, humans are more closely related to dogs than dogs are to thylacines, even if dogs look more like thylacines than humans. Humans are are also more closely related to lions than lions are to the “marsupial lion,” Thylacoleo carnifex.

These statements are well-backed up in genetic studies and in analyses of the fossil record.

So how on earth could this concept of “kind” mean anything? If dogs and thylacines are the same kind,  how on earth could that ever be a useful way of categorizing species?

This might be the most bizarre creationist claim I’ve yet encountered.

Furthermore, marsupial moles looking like golden moles and thylacines looking like dogs are only the two best examples of marsupials resembles placentals.  Koalas really don’t look like bears, and the marsupial lion was very, very different from a big cat. The teeth of the marsupial lion were different from any other mammal living or extinct.

So this is one big croc of fail sauce.

Or something else.