A Canadian creationism leader has discovered a 60 million-year-old fish fossil, but the scientific proof of the fossil’s age isn’t swaying his beliefs at all.
Edgar Nernberg, who serves on the board of Big Valley’s Creationist Museum, uncovered
what the Calgary Sun called “one of the most important fossil finds in decades” while operating a backhoe. The five perfectly preserved fish in the fossil were unveiled by the University of Calgary Thursday.
But Nernberg doesn’t believe that date at all.
“No, it hasn’t changed my mind. We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,” he told the Sun. “There’s no dates stamped on these things."
Nernberg was digging out a basement when he noticed something while working.
He told the University of Calgary, “The something I noticed was quite extraordinary, I knew right away that this was different from the other fossils I have uncovered in my many years of excavating and collecting fossils.”
The five fish were buried in sandstone in the Paskapoo Formation, which the university said is a 60 million-year-old formation that lies under the Calgary area.
“Because complete fossils are relatively rare from this time period in Alberta, any such discoveries are significant as they shed light on the nature and diversity of animals that lived not long after the extinction of the dinosaurs,” Darla Zelenitsky, paleontologist and assistant professor at the university, said.
But despite the university estimation of the fossil’s age, Nernberg is firm in his belief that the world is 6,000 years old. That conviction, in spite of evidence like isotopic dating, made him the topic of discussion online.
“But this can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's ‘opposed’ to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as
fabricated or misinterpreted,” wrote the Washington Post.