Perspectives Origin of vertebrates confirmed in the Early

It was not that long ago when the origin of the first vertebrate (fish) was pushed back into the Late Cambrian within the evolutionary time scale.1–3 Then several years ago, two fish-like fossils Myllokunmingia and Haik-ouichthys, with some surprisingly advanced features were discovered from the Early Cambrian in China.4,5 Recently, more than 500 fossils of Haikouichthys have been unearthed in Early Cambrian strata in China.6 These fish somewhat resemble the larva of modern lampreys, a jawless fish (class Agnatha). The upshot of this discovery is to push back the supposed evolution of fish to a very short period during the very beginning of the Cambrian. Ver-tebrates join other existing phyla, as well as many extinct phyla, in the great and mysterious Cambrian ‘big bang’ in the evolutionary story—the sudden existence of so many different types of fossils with few if any supposed ancestors. This is clear evidence that evolution never happened. Elimination of possible transitional species It is well known that a major gap exists between invertebrates and vertebrates.7 Supposedly, some inver-tebrate had to evolve into a vertebrate in the late Precambrian or very Early Cambrian. For a long time evolution-ists had no candidate for a transitional fossil. However, in recent years they have consider Branchiostoma (pre-viously known as Amphioxus) as a living representative of a transitional organism to the first vertebrate.8 Bran-chiostoma is a lancelet with a noto-chord, no brain, no eyes and no sense of smell (see figure 1).9 It is soft bod-ied and, therefore, the evolutionists believed that its vertebrate ancestors would also be soft bodied and unable to be fossilized. Evolutionists have used this strange little organism to dodge the impli-cations of this tre-mendous gap in the fossil record and to provide a reason for the lack of transitional fos-sils (due to their lack of preserva-tion). In answer to the evolution-ary problem, that Branchiostoma is a living organism and not a fossil from way back; evolutionists have presented Pikaia as a transitional fossil.10 Pikaia is an exotic verte-brate-like organism from the Middle Cambrian Burgess shale of souther