Creation Spotlight
The Duck-Billed Platypus After Its Kind
The duck-billed platypus is a very unusual creature. It is classified
as a mammal because the mothers produce milk for their young, but they
also lay eggs, one of only two mammals, monotremes, that do that.
Platypuses combine traits that normally don’t go together, a bill like
a duck, tail like a beaver, poison like a snake, eggs like a turtle and
the milk that makes it a mammal.
When platypuses were first sent back to Europe from Australia, they
were thought to be fakes, a hoax manufactured by a clever Chinese
taxidermist. European scientists didn’t believe that the platypuses’
traits could all exist within the same animal, but they do.
Platypuses are about the size of cats. They live in burrows along
streams, rivers and lakes in eastern Australia, although they spend a
great deal of their time in the water. They live on small water
creatures, even having the ability to detect electrical discharges
from their prey in order to be able to find them in the dark.
At first glance it would seem that the platypus should be the poster
animal for evolutionism, but interestingly enough it isn’t. An animal
that combines traits several different orders of animals would seem
like the perfect answer to Creationists who ask evolutionists for an
example of a transitional, half-and-half, animal, but evolutionists
don’t use it for that.
The central belief of the religion of evolutionism is that animals are
capable of unlimited change. Their story is that after the first cell
somehow appeared out of the primordial ooze, that cell somehow mutated
into the countless varieties of life that have existed. Unfortunately
for the evolutionists, the facts tell a very different story. The
fossil record shows no evidence of any significant change having
happened to any creature in the fossil record. Even Charles Darwin
realized that the fossil record didn’t help his story saying, “the
fossil record is the strongest argument against my theory”. But surely
in the last 140 years the situation has changed? But not so, as a quote
from a leading evolutionist, David Raup, shows “Conflicts Between
Darwin and Paleontology”, p 23, “Instead of finding the gradual
unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time and geologists of
the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that
is species appear in the sequence (fossil record) very suddenly, show
little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly
go out of the record.” What both Darwin and Raup are admitting is that
the fossil record does not support the evolution story they tell. There
is no fossil evidence of the changes that the religion of evolutionism
requires.
So why don’t evolutionists use the platypus in their story telling?,
because it isn’t changing. The fossils of platypuses show the same kind
of animal that exists today. Existing platypuses are also not changing.
They are not becoming more like any of the animals that they share
features with. What we see today is an animal that has been exquisitely
designed to do what it does. The duck-billed platypus is another
example how God created a rich and varied, even comical, world.
The evidence for God’s Creation can be as great as a star or as small as a platypus.
