A Fossilized Human Finger
The Creation Evidence Museum acquired a fossilized human finger in the mid-1980s. It was found by a landowner during the construction of a gravel road extracted from the Cretaceous Walnut Formation of Comanche Peak.
Recent advances in scanning techniques have provided some astonishing images of the interior of this fossil. These images and other studies show that it is indeed a human finger of someone who was rapidly buried during a catastrophic event, long ago.
The photograph above is an astonishing image that instantly sparks a battle in our minds. One part says "this is a finger!", while another part says "it's a fake!".
The reason for such contradiction is not hard to understand. It certainly looks like a finger, but we are preconditioned by popular media and "educated" to believe that soft tissues cannot fossilize and that humans were not present on Earth when the Cretaceous rock, in which the alleged finger was found, was formed.
Let's address the first dilemma. Soft tissue of the finger is fossilized and preserved with exceptional detail when the organism itself is rapidly buried immediately after or before death. Evidence of this can be seen in the well-preserved fossils of worms that have been found in various countries, as demonstrated by the following photograph.
Under conditions of rapid burial, individual cells in an organism can mineralize and harden individually, preserving microscopic details of the original plant or animal.
How can we see inside a fossil?
There are two methods.
The first, called sectioning, involves using a thin diamond saw to cut through the fossil in the section we want to study, then cleaning the knife surfaces so that the differences in tissues and colors show up (1st photo).
When done well, this method reveals even very fine internal details. Unfortunately, this system "breaks" the fossil and causes problems for other types of tests.
The second, much less destructive system, is to use forms of radiation, such as X-rays, to penetrate the rock and record the variations in internal densities. Simple X-ray techniques cannot distinctly show differences between bones and stone, which tend to have similar densities. CT scanning is an improvement that overcomes these limitations by focusing on a thin portion of the sample.
This is the method used to obtain the internal photographs of the fossil presented in this article.
The hand is a magnificent assembly of levers (bones), ropes (tendons), and pins and pulleys (joints). It allows a pitcher to throw a curveball to a precise spot or a violinist to play a Paganini concerto. Some of this "machinery" is present in the scans made of the fossilized finger and shown here.
The side view shows black areas that are interpreted as the internal parts of the bones and marrow. These areas have less density compared to the surrounding stone, and are much more easily penetrated by X-rays, causing a darkening of the image. The image also shows slightly less dark areas caused by sectioning.
The top view clearly shows the area of the nail and cuticle, including the thin arch where the nail is under the skin of the cuticle.
And the second part of our mental battle then? This fossil is absolutely human in appearance, both inside and out. But it was found in Cretaceous rock, dated to about a hundred million years ago.
This suggests three possible solutions:
- some dinosaurs had almost human-like fingers;
- a prehistoric mollusk with internal and external features identical to a human finger;
- or humans, as it seems in other evidence, were already present during the Cretaceous era.
