Living Fossils?

What would the world think if we suddenly discovered a living dinosaur? I can imagine there would be shock, confusion, and then a negative reaction against the scientific establishment, which assured us that dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. I doubt we will ever find a living dinosaur. However, we have discovered a number of species which were thought to have become extinct with or even before the time of dinosaurs. This ought to call into question not only the theory of evolution, but the supposed great ages for the earth itself.

Let us introduce a few of these animals. The most famous example is a fish called the coelacanth. It was presumed to have died off 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs, but was found in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. These fish live today along the shoreline of the Indian Ocean. It has an unusual two-lobed tail.

The discovery of a fish thought to be extinct for so long is more than just an "oops, my bad" moment for evolutionists. A fish reaches an age of reproductive maturity in less than two years. Therefore, the living coelacanth is, according to the evolutionary timeline, 30 million generations descended from the 65 million year old fossil coelacanth that evolutionists see in the fossil record. That means 30 million generations and it didn't evolve at all. The ancestors of humans, according to the evolutionary timeline, were an unrecognizable mammal 65 million years ago, and that was a lot less than 30 million generations. There is another problem for the evolutionists. There are many fossil coelacanths (search "fossil coelacanths" on google images to see a fair sample). Yet somehow, the story goes, we have recovered many fossil coelacanths of more than 65 million years in age, but no fossil coelacanths that are less than 65 million years old. This is so implausible that it should call into question the existence of the 65 million years.

If the coelacanth were the only example of this kind, that would be one thing, but there are more. Wikipedia lists under "Lazarus taxon" 12 different plants and animals known previously only from the fossil record, then discovered alive. A hat-shaped clam known as monoplacophora was originally thought to have gone extinct during the Devonian period (370 million years ago, by the conventional timeline) but discovered off Costa Rico in 1952. For evolutionists, this is even worse than the fish, because the years are greater, and the fossil record is full of clams.