The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event Another Problem for Naturalists

The Cambrian Explosion refers to a geologically short period of time in which every type of basic body plan (phylum) of all animals alive today - and quite a few others which are now extinct- show up in the fossil record. Many scientists say that this happened within a 30 million year time period- a long time to us but shockingly fast if we are counting on naturalistic evolutionary forces to produce dozens of new body plans. But it gets worse because other research suggests that the real innovation occurred in only 20 million years.

Even that number probably over-estimates the time it took for all these new phyla to show up. This is because it is only a calculation based on the fossils we have found in the fossil record. What if the new phylum which shows twenty million years after the Cambrian begins is really of a creature who was around much earlier, we just haven't found an earlier fossil of it yet? So the short length of time is liable to get shorter as we learn more.

Of course naturalists don't like what this implies, so they have been hard at work producing speculation about how the life forms of the previous era were not so different after all and basically dreaming up everything they can to make the case that the Cambrian Explosion wasn't such a big deal after all.

But it turns out they have another problem almost as big as the Cambrian Explosion and this one might be even harder to explain away. While all these new phyla show up in the Cambrian, they don't diversify for 40 million years. Each body plan has very few species with that plan. Then, all phyla start dramatically diversifying at once into new families. Its called "The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event" and it happened in an even shorter period of time than the Cambrian Explosion.

Now it turns out that this event too happened in a much narrower window of time than one might expect with known naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms. Here is how the link described it....

The early evolution of animal life on Earth is a complex and fascinating subject. The Cambrian Explosion (between about 540 to 510 million years ago) produced a stunning array of body plans, but very few separate species of each, notes Stigall. But nearly 40 million years later, during the Ordovician Period, this situation changed, with a rapid radiation of species and genera during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.

I think what they are trying not to say is that naturalists have two problems, not one, when it comes to explaining the diversification of life in the seas. The earth can bring forth living things after their kinds- there is a background sort of "evolution" going on, but the record also shows changes too big and too fast to reasonably explained by any known evolutionary method. It looks like at certain points, nature had help. Help to do things greater and faster than she can do on her own without it- we don't see that magnitude of rapid change now.

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