Old Salamanders Just Like New

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Old salamanders just like new concludes science writer Robert Carroll in Nature, vol. 410, p534, 29 March 2001 writing about the discovery of more than 500 salamander fossils buried in a Jurassic volcanic deposit in China. "The fossils are immediately recognisable as salamanders from their body and limb proportions, as well as from details of their skull anatomy," writes Carroll. The fossil salamanders also had a limb bone structure that is only found in salamanders (fossil and living) and not in other types of amphibians. Experts Ke-Quin Gao and Neil Shubin, who studied the fossils and reported them to Nature (same issue, p574), claim the salamander body plan "has remained fundamentally stable for over 150 million years."

Editorial Comment: The Bible uses a different term for "fundamentally stable" - it is "after their kind" - a phrase God uses ten times in Genesis 1 to describe the world He created. It is only because salamanders have faithfully reproduced "after their kind" that the Chinese fossils were immediately recognisable. (Ref. salamander, fossil, after their kind)