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The turning point came with the discovery of sea floor spreading at the Atlantic ridge around 1960. However, The Urantia Book's story of the Earth's geological history from 750,000,000 years ago had been presented in the face of intense opposition to continental drift and also to Wegener's view that drift had started much more recently, around the 200,000, 000 year mark.
In the 1980's, geologists started to publish their belief that the first breakdown of a single continent commenced much earlier, around 500,000,000 years ago. By 1995, this had blown out to 750,000,000, the same period as given in the Urantia Paper.2 So was continental drift, commencing 750 million years ago just a lucky guess? There is only one chance in hundreds of it being so. But if not by chance, why have the revelators given us what appears to be an utterly ridiculous account of other aspects of geological history?
Page-667. "550,000,000 years ago the Life Carrier corps returned to Urantia. In co-operation with spiritual powers and superphysical forces we organized and initiated the original life patterns of this world and planted them in the hospitable waters of the realm. All planetary life (aside from extraplanetary personalities) down to the days of Caligastia, the Planetary Prince, had its origin in our three original, identical, and simultaneous marine-life implantations. These three life implantations have been designated as: the central or Eurasian-African, the eastern or Australasian, and the western, embracing Greenland and the Americas."
Page-668. "500,000,000 years ago primitive marine vegetable life was well established on Urantia."
Comment: Primitive marine vegetable life of both prokaryote (no nucleus housing the chromosome) and eukaryote forms (chromosomes are contained in a nucleus) had for long existed on Urantia. The prokaryotes were in existence close to 4 billion years ago while the eukaryotes, including photosynthetic algae, had been present for about 2 billion years.
Fossils of red algae of the species Eosphaera and Huroniospora are dated at 1.9 billion years ago. The crawling trails of bottom-dwelling, worm-like creatures are found among Ediacaran fossils that occur as early as about 1 billion years ago. Amongst these Ediacaran creatures was a leaf-like organism called Charniodiscus that grew to about 10 feet in length and had a holdfast for anchoring it to the sea bed.
The only way to reconcile the Urantia Papers version of the beginning of life on our planet with the fossil evidence is to redefine what is meant by "life." It is possible that the life implantations made by the Life Carriers were re-organized from the existing forms and had the full potential to eventually evolve to a self-conscious intelligent life form. It would be this latter quality that defines it as life for the Revelators.
Evidence of our direct relationship to the early forms that we call "life" is present in the DNA of our shared genes--so these forms would need to be classed as pre-life if the Revelators' assertion is correct. Of course, new readers would not be likely to rationalize such an apparent error.
Page-673. "400,000,000 years ago marine life, both vegetable and animal, is fairly well distributed over the whole world. The world climate grows slightly warmer and becomes more equable. There is a general inundation of the seashores of the various continents, particularly of North and South America. New oceans appear, and the older bodies of water are greatly enlarged.
"Vegetation now for the first time crawls out upon the land and soon makes considerable progress in adaptation to a nonmarine habitat.
"Suddenly and without gradation ancestry the first multicellular animals make their appearance."
Comment: According to modern paleontology, most of the known phyla were already represented in the Cambrian period, 570-505 million years ago.3 The multicellular priapulid worms were already diverse, fossils of annelid worm are present, also sponges, coelenterates, arthropods, trilobites, and crustaceans. Air-breathing scorpions are found in the Silurian period, 410-435 million years ago.3
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