In August, the journal Nature published an article entitled “a complete insect from the Late Devonian Period” by an international research team from Europe and the United States lead by Romain Garrouste of the Muséum National d’Histoire.

The report centers on a 8 millimeter insect discovered in Strud, Belgium that was highlighted in the media as “Belgian bug is world’s oldest insect”, “humble bug plugs gap in fossil record”, “insect fossil from Devonian may shed light on birth of insect flight”, “amazing fossil discovery shows how insects got their wings” even though the fossil was wingless.

The fossil was named Strudiella devonica after the area of discovery, Strud, Belgium, and the postulated date of origin, the Devonian Period. Evolutionists date the Devonian Period at 408 to 362 million years ago.

S. devonica joins Rhyniognatha hirsti as the world’s oldest known insects. R. hirsti was discovered more than 90 years ago by W. Cran and officially named in 1928 by entomologist Robin J. Tillyard. S. devonica and R. hirsti are the only two recognized species as an early, but not original, insect. R. hirsti is thought to represent the Early Devonian and S. devonica the Late Devonian Period.

“The current fossil [S. devonica] is much more complete than any other record from the Devonian and comes from the Late Devonian,” said co-author Michael S. Engel, who also serves as senior curator at University of Kansas Natural History Museum.

“It has everything an insect should have: the legs, the antennae, the thorax and the abdomen,” says Andre Nel of France’s National History Museum, one of the authors of the study.

Scientists until now had few if any confirmed insect fossils from between 385 and 325 million years ago, a period known as the Hexapoda Gap, writes William A Shear of Hampden-Sydney College in a commentary that accompanied the study.

The lack of fossil evidence has plagued evolution since the publication of The Origin of Species more than 150 years ago. Evolutionists have been stymied by the enduring gigantic gaps in the fossil record.

Even Charles Darwin had lamented problem,

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain [fossil record]; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.

Darwin addressed the fossils record problem at the time by reasoning that “only a small portion of the surface of the Earth has been geologically explored.”

Once the Earth had been explored Darwin speculated that “the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.”

Now, for more than 150 years, however, evidence for Darwin’s “inconceivably great” number of transitional insect links has continued to escape scientists, even within the realm of entomology.

While the discovery of S. devonica does narrow the gap, a gigantic gap still remains: “In between this profusion of creatures of all kinds – cockroaches, dragonflies, grasshoppers – and the earliest specimens, we have nothing,” further opined Nel, one of the authors.

If evolution is true, an “inconceivably great” number of transitional links must have existed, as demanded by Darwin. However, the authors failed to present any scientific evidence to support the transitional link status of S. devonica.

Rather than providing evidence to support evolution, the evidence published in Nature actually provides scientific evidence to support the Genesis origin of life record.

In the words of anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh, life “appear[ed] in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus—full grown and raring to go.”

“The evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be,”  writes David Raup, Curator of Geology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History), “We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than in Darwin’s time … so Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated.”

“Fossils have … failed to yield the host of transitional form demanded by evolutionary theory,” according the Australian molecular biologist Michael Denton, and “absence of transitional forms is dramatically obvious.”

While S. devonica may narrow the gap, the scientific evidence continues to point to an endless gigantic gap as the enduring picture for the history of life.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now, evolution is simply a theoretical philosophy, not a scientific fact.

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