Have you ever heard of the Burgess Shale? There are many fossils of soft-tissued organisms that have been found there, as well as tens of thousands of fossils invertebrates that have been collected there. The explantion that purported precursors have not been discovered because they were soft bodied is belied by these discoveries. If there are invertebrate precursors to verterbrates that have been discovered in the fossil record that document the transition I would like to see them, and I would like to know why prominent evolutionists admit that they do not appear in the fossil record if they indeed, do.
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Are you under the misapprehension that vertebrates evolved during the Cambrian explosion??
The Burgess Shale is a unique and invaluable deposit, unfortunately such conditions were not present everywhere (and everywhen) we would like them to be. The Burgess Shale is the exception, not the rule.
At any rate you need to parse my post again. I said that the Cambrian explosion is not as explosive as originally thought because we have gone back and found organisms living earlier that were thought to have originated in the Cambrian explosion.
The Cambrian explosion definitely is an important period in evolution, and the rapid radiation see here was probably enabled by a variety of factors including global warming (oh no!), a higher oxygen content of the atmosphere, and the emergence of the Hox genes, which allow for rapid and significant changes in body plan.
No, I'm not. You are asserting that there are precursors to Cambrian organisms that have been discovered, and further, that such fossils were not discovered earlier because they were soft bodied and thus not easily fossilized. I am assuming that you mean some sort of transitional precursors in the sense of lineage, ancestry, or common descent.
I think the implication that the fossil record is incomplete because soft bodied organisms are not easily fossilized is belied by the tremendous variety of soft bodied fossil finds in the Burgess Shale and elsewhere, such as the Wheeler and Marjum Formations in Utah, and Early Cambrian Chengjiang China Fossils
"The Maotianshan shale known as Chengjiang ranks as one of the most important Lagerstätten fossil sites in the world. The Chengjiang site is located in the Yunnan Province of China in the villages of Ercaicun and Chengjiang near the city of Kunming. Some 50 meters of mudstone sediment are exposed, yielded many excellently preserved soft-bodied creatures of the Cambrian Explosion. Dated at 525 million years ago, it lies just above the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary at 544 million years ago."
Fossil evidence of purported transitional forms is lacking, not because the organisms were soft bodied, but because the theory requires major phyla to have supposedly appeared very deep in the Precambrian, hundreds of millions of years before the oldest fossils in the fossil record. And some of these alleged "precursors" fossils that are being found are further compounding the problem, not only by complete absence of fossil evidence of the origin of these complex invertebrates, which by themselves constitute about 95% of the entire fossil record, but by compressing the available time for invertebrate to vertebrate evolution down to an incredible 2 or 3 million years.
If there is evidence for these purported transitions, it is not in the fossil record, and the reason is not because the organisms were soft bodied.
Cordially,