A “treasure trove” of Charles Darwin fossils, rediscovered in a “gloomy corner” of the British Geological Survey (BGS) building where it lay unnoticed for more than 150 years, was one of this week’s media highlights.  The story was covered by CBS, FOX, ABC, BBC, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal.

In April 2011, British palaeontologist Howard Falcon-Lang at Royal Holloway, University of London, walking through the GBS building of earth sciences spotted an old wooden cabinet hidden in a forgotten corner and “pulled open the door without breaking it, and found a series of drawers containing hundreds of rock samples.”

Normal enough stuff, until he took one out.

“I held it up to the light and tried to make out the words on the slide and there was the signature: C. Darwin, Esquire,” Falcon-Lang says, adding he could “hardly believe it. My heart was pounding all around my body.”

“Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets,” Dr Falcon-Lang explained. “This process allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labeled ‘C. Darwin Esq.’”

The specimen was a piece of fossil wood collected along the South American coast during his famous Voyage of the Beagle in 1834.

Most of the evidence Darwin used has been well documented, but the samples Howard Falcon-Lang accidentally found had been lost because Darwin entrusted them to a fellow scientist, Joseph Dalton Hooker. Hooker did not number these fossils, a problem now for a warehouse with more that 10 million rock samples. Hooker became a close friend of Darwin.

Hooker had assembled this collection of 314 slides while working for the BGS in 1846. The slides – “stunning works of art,” according to Falcon-Lang, contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes.

John Ludden, executive director of BGS said: “This is quite a remarkable discovery. It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.”

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken “a long time” to figure out the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said. The slides have now been photographed and will be made available to the public through a new online museum exhibit opening Tuesday.

“Scientists are only now starting to study it and understand its scientific importance,” according to Falcon-Lang.

“This is quite a remarkable discovery,” John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, said. “It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.” Could the fossil wood specimens be Darwin’s holy fossil grail? Probably not.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin never used fossilized trees to as examples of evolutionary transitional forms. While the specimens Falcon-Lang rediscovered are stunning, the specimens failed to capture a convincing attention of Darwin or Hooker. Historically, little evidence has been gleaned from fossilized plants or from fossilized animals.

Even the infamous evolution of the horse story espoused by Darwin in The Origin of Species was disintegrated in the twentieth century.

Grasping for significance in the wood fossil highlights the problem with the theory of evolution – lack of fossil record evidence for Darwin’s “innumerable transition” links in the fossil record.  In fact, the lack of fossilized transitional links was a known problem in 1834, and the problem continues to persist.

“The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links”, Darwin argued in 1872 edition of The Origin of Species, “is a very obvious difficulty.” Darwin continued, “Geology [the fossil record} assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.”

In the words of American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

In the Presidential Address at the Geological Association, Derek V. Ager dismayed of the fossil record, went on the record to say, “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.”

Senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, Colin Patterson, brings the importance of the fossil record into perspective: “Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.”

While Darwin would not be surprised by Gould, Ager, or at Colin Patterson comments, he would be disappointed in the intense interest in the trivial evidence shown by the media.

The evolution industry was once a theory in crisis, now the evolution industry is in crisis without a theory−with believers begging for any scrap of evidence.