4h) Continued
ii) What about the Kangaroos?
I see some room for interpreting the Bible accounts to allow for platypuses and kangaroos in Australia. They had to find their way to this isolated spot and establish a closed population there, given only a few thousand years since the flood. People could have brought them there in boats. The post-Flood climate had changed and the remaining humans had to find suitable climates for the animals that they had just preserved. They might have immediately started out on a program of re-habitation where they went off in smaller boats with some animals to find new suitable environments. Australia may have been the only adequate environment for those weird creatures. The Bible says these humans were pretty super compared to what we have degraded to today. Who knows? Does this mystery in any way negate the Biblical accounts? The purpose of the Biblical record unfortunately was not to clarify all these mysteries, so it is noticeably light on these details. Still, if the rest of the account is true, then this is a plausible explanation.
The alternate theory is that the unique animals now living in Australia are evolving from those that were left behind after a land bridge to this continent disappeared. This different environment then caused this line of animals to evolve differently. Does this account for the lack of links in the fossil record? Is there any evidence that this process is still ongoing?
We were recently filming an educational segment in Hawaii, on how Rocks turn into Rainforests.
On the Big Island of Hawaii you have a very interesting situation in progress. Lava bubbles up from a hot spot in the ocean floor and forms these volcanic islands. The lava is thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and no life exists on it for sure, not even bacteria. It cools down quickly and if you come back even a few decades later you'll find life has taken root. There isn't even any nitrogen in this rock. What gives?
The life forms arrive from elsewhere, where they already existed. Organisms wash ashore of course, but spores are also blown in from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia half a world away. The original plants get their nitrogen from the air and then leave it in the ground when they decay. Other plants grow out of this humus later. Anywhere water accumulates we find life forms trying to grow. It's pretty amazing. We found dirt in some subtropical rainforests built-up directly on this lava. What really surprised me, though, was finding worms in that dirt and even "happy face spiders". None of this has had much time to evolve. It was all carried here already to grow as it had been elsewhere. Yet, in many cases the plant growing in Hawaii looks different in this environment than it did back home.
There are no snakes in Hawaii. Someone would have had to carry a snake there. There are birds in Hawaii. Some have migrated and others were carried there by humans. Its all part of the equation. Once there, they develop in an isolated environment and things look different. Yet, they are either unique kinds directly-carried there, or they are still of the same kind as their cousins back home. I think this accounts for the weird animals and plants in many isolated spots around the globe.
26 July 2001
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