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Page-674. This was the biogeologic picture of Urantia at the end of that long period of the world's history, embracing fifty million years, designated by your geologists as the Cambrian.
Comment: This curious statement appears at the end of a section commencing at 360,000,000 years ago so would cover from 410-360 million years ago. As far back as the 1950's the Cambrian period was given as from 540,000,000 to 500,000,000 years ago.
Page-675. 310,000,000 years ago. "The marine fauna developed to the point where every type of life below the vertebrate scale was represented in the fossils of those rocks which were laid down during these times. But all of these animals were marine organisms. No land animals had yet appeared except a few types of worms which burrowed along the seashores, nor had the land plants yet overspread the continents; there was still too much carbon dioxide in the air to permit the existence of air breathers."
Comment: Air-breathing scorpions (an animal) were present in the Silurian period 100 million years earlier. Fossil evidence for land plants exists in the Ordovician (505-438 million years ago) and fossilized tracheids (which are diagnostic of vascular plants) are found in the early Devonian (408-360 million years ago)
Page-681. "200,000,000 years ago the really active stages of the Carboniferous period began. For twenty million years prior to this time the earlier coal deposits were being laid down, but now the more extensive coal-formation activities were in process. The length of the actual coal-deposition epoch was a little over twenty-five million years.
"180,000,000 years ago brought the close of the Carboniferous period, during which coal had been formed all over the world--in Europe, India, China, North Africa, and the Americas."
Comment: Modern geology places the Carboniferous at from 360,000,000 to 286,000,000 years ago. In the 1950 period some geologists drew the boundaries at 320,000,000 to 260,000,000 years ago. It would be interesting to obtain information on the geological time scale for the 1920 to 1935 period. As with other commentaries on matters of science and cosmology in the Urantia Papers, it is possible that much of the information on paleontology is drawn from one or two text books that were current in that period. If so, they will eventually come to light.
However the time scale for continental drift is another matter, the commencing period at 750,000,000 years ago not appearing in science papers until the 1990's. Also the age given for the origin of the solar system of 4.5 billion years is remarkable for 1934, the time the Papers were received, or even for 1955 when they were published. In 1952, Hubble had estimated the rate of universe expansion and from his data, calculated its age to be 2 billion years. Later it was found that the Cepheid variable stars used in measuring distance from the Earth actually had two components and Hubble's age for the universe had to be doubled. But that still made the Urantia Paper's age for the solar system about the same as Hubble's estimate for the whole universe--which was known to be impossible.
By 1955 a new estimate made from radiometric data from meteorites put the solar system's age at 4.6 billion years. Could this new information have been used in writing the account given in the Urantia Papers? To do so would have required a complete rewriting of at least 50 pages. In 1955, far too many people had been involved in checking the galley proofs for the book for this to have been even a remote possibility.
Further curiosities are statements such as 45,000 years ago "the ancestors of kangaroos (marsupials) roamed Australia" (694) and around this time, "a southern land bridge connected Australia, Antarctica, and South America." (695) At the time this was written, the concept of wandering continents was heresy--which left paleontologists debating about how marsupials could have existed in both South America and Australia. The 1982 discovery of marsupial fossils at Seymour Island in Antarctica confirmed that their migration between these continents had indeed been possible.3
Likewise Page 689 tells us "…as the continental land drift continued, it met with the first great obstruction on the deep floor of the Pacific. This contention of geologic forces gave impetus to the formation of the whole vast north and south mountain range extending from Alaska down through Mexico to Cape Horn."
Comment: The concept of plate tectonics and the Pacific plate diving under the American plates and pushing up the coastal mountain chains did not become an acceptable hypothesis until long after the The Urantia Book was published.
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