Mammalian Explosion 311In other cases, creationist accusations are simply misleading and unreasonable. Gish
(1995) and Davis and Kenyon (2004:102) argue that the fossil record is so good that even
bats should fossilize easily, and these creationists harp on the fact that the earliest bats
from the Eocene seem to look a lot like modern bats. If they knew anything at all about
bats and fossilization processes, they would realize that bats have very delicate skeletons
and tiny hollow bones, so they are very rarely fossilized (Simmons and Geisler 1998; Sim-
mons 2005). We have just a handful of bat fossils over the entire Cenozoic, and most of
them are just jaws and teeth. There are just a few extraordinarily complete bat specimens
with wing membranes from amazing localities like Messel in Germany and the Green
River Shale in Wyoming, all stagnant lake deposits that happened to preserve beautiful
fossils, but the creationist emphasis on these one or two extraordinary specimens gives
the false impression that we should be finding these lucky accidents all the time. If we
were fortunate enough to have a similar extraordinary deposit like Liaoning or Messel
for the Paleocene, we might find better transitional bat fossils, but more than a century
of looking still hasn’t produced such a locality. More importantly, the creationists are
wrong when they claim that these Eocene bats look just like modern bats. That may be
FIGURE 13.13. The Paleocene and Eocene fossils of China include anagalids and eurymylids, which are the
transitional form linking rabbits and rodents with other mammals. This is the skull of Rhombomylus, which
has rodent-like and rabbit-like features such as the chisel-shaped incisors, diastema, and cheek teeth, yet it is
transitional between both groups. (Courtesy Meng Jin)
1 cm