Panderichthys, Wikipedia and the Polish tetrapods

It is two and a half months since the tetrapod tracks found in Poland have upturned the neat fish-to-tetrapod transition that has been so popular for promoting evolution. This morning, there was still no word on the Wikipedia entry for Panderichthys so I added the following to “Include tetrapod tracks found in Poland and implications”.

In January 2010, Nature reported well-preserved and “securely dated” tetrapod tracks from Polish marine tidal flat sediments of early Middle Devonian (Eifelian stage) age that are approximately 18 million years older than the earliest tetrapod body fossils and 10 million years earlier than the oldest elpistostegids.[1] They force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish–tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record. Panderichthys cannot now be part of the fish-to-legged-animal transition, which is considered to have occurred much earlier at around 400 million years ago.[2] Thus the familiar sequence of dated lobe-finned fish is no longer applicable to the actual transition, each fossil in that sequence can at best only represent a “late surviving relic”, and its date is now irrelevant to the transition.

1. ^ Niedzwiedzki, G., Szrek, P., Narkiewicz, K., Narkiewicz, M and Ahlberg, P., Nature 463(7227):43–48, 2010, Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland,7 January 2010.
2. ^ Editor’s summary: Four feet in the past: trackways pre-date earliest body fossils. Nature 463.

So now they know.

I’ve quoted the evolutionary dates above but of course these are based on long-age assumptions. From a biblical perspective these fossils were buried about 4,500 years ago during the Inundatory stage of the global Flood, as the waters were rising on the earth.