George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most widely respected paleontologists of all time, mentioned a few bio-geographical oddities himself.  Among them was the horse Anchitherium, which existed in both Spain and North America, and the elephantine Mastodon, which originated in Africa but somehow got to North America.  Simpson proposed that such distributions of animals across continents was best attributed to plate tectonics – that is, continents moving around and crashing into one another, thus allowing animals to migrate from one continent to another across dry land.[1]  Today, plate tectonics are relatively well understood, and we can date the approximate times that certain continents were connected by land bridges, and when they were not.  The ability to date the locations of the continents imposes some limitations to Simpson's theory, because not all strange distributions of animals across continents can be explained when certain constraints in deep time place vast oceans in the way of immigrations that we know must have happened.  But Simpson also had a second theory on migration which addresses this problem. 

     Simpson proposed that some animals get "sweepstakes tickets" across large bodies of water.  According to the theory, a pregnant animal hops on a log or sturdy mat of vegetation that floats out to sea, and somehow the animal stays afloat and hydrated until it reaches a foreign continent.  The new continent is then populated by means of incest among the children of the immigrant.  However unlikely such a journey may be, it stands to reason, so they say, that it happens once every billionth blue moon.  In such a fashion, it is believed, monkeys and marsupials crossed over to South America, and a multitude of other lucky land mammals traversed the waters between Eurasia and the islands of proto-Spain and proto-India, and others from Asia to the East Indies. 

 

Rodents – A Challenge to Simpson's Sweepstakes

     A problem with the theory concerns the lack of rodents who made these alleged epic journeys on the high seas.  If monkeys and marsupials can hop on logs and cross an ocean, then certainly squirrels and rats should be capable of doing so also.  There are several factors which make rodents prime characters for testing the sweepstakes theory.  First, rodents are small enough to float on a log without weighing it down.  Second, they have claws which can cling to a log tossed about by waves.  Third, rodents have an excellent fossil record.  Their fossils can be found in abundant numbers, much more so than the majority of other terrestrial vertebrates.  If they made it to a certain continent, we should expect to find fossil evidence for their arrival. 

     However, such is not the case.  Of the 151 genera of mice and rats listed in McKenna and Bell, not a single genus appears indigenously on both sides of a large ocean when there is no plausible terrestrial connection – not a single one.  Granted, they got to Australia, but this only happened at a very late date, and only because of the low sea levels caused by the ice ages.  For the vast majority of the time mice and rats have been on this planet, the bulk of which was before the ice ages, they were absent from Australia.  Mice and rats never did make it to the Americas – not by natural means.[2]  It took Christopher Columbus to bring them to the New World.  If there were ever an animal that was small enough, agile enough, with claws clingy enough, and with enough of a limit to its fresh water requirements due to its small size, to climb aboard a tree branch and float across the turbulent high seas, shouldn't we expect a mouse to do it?

     Concerning the broader category of rodents as a whole, of the 246 families, subfamilies, tribes, and subtribes listed in McKenna and Bell, three clear examples exist where the same group appears on both sides of a wide ocean without a plausible landbridge.[3] 

     Porcupines are the biggest of the three mysteries.  Of all the rodents that might grip a log and hold on for a thousand miles of mighty waves, porcupines are one of the least likely candidates.  They are large and unstable compared to squirrels, mice, and a host of other rodents, both extant and extinct.  Porcupines first appear in the Oligocene of South America.  Rodents as a whole had originated in Asia – the farthest place on Earth from South America.  So how did porcupine ancestors get from Asia to South America?  One thing is certain:  they could not have come via North America.  Although Beringia (Alaska-Siberia) was functioning as a landbridge for much of the Cenozoic, the Panamanian landbridge did not exist until just 4 million years ago.  Moreover, there are no fossil porcupine species in North America until after the Panamanian landbridge was established – meaning that North American porcupines came from South America, not vice-versa.  Could they have come from Africa?  The problem here is also two-fold; first, because Africa was already separated from South America long before rodents even existed, and second, because porcupine relatives in Africa do not appear until the Miocene, which is after they first appeared in South America.  It is possible that porcupines were in Europe during the Oligocene,[4] in which case we are left with the unlikely proposition that the porcupines pulled a Christopher Columbus across the widest part of the Atlantic. 

     The other two inexplicable rodent distributions are the case of the African rodent family Zegdoumyidae, and the genus Protophiomys.[5]  These appear in the African Eocene long before Africa was attached to Asia via the Suez.  The Afro-Arabian continental plate separated from Eurasia while the age of the dinosaurs was still young, and it did not rejoin Eurasia until the time of human-like apes.  The Eocene is after the former but before the latter.  Thus, Africa was an island continent when these lineages of rodents somehow immigrated to it.

     The history of rodents is well known from the fossil record.  They originated in Asia during the Paleocene, from whence they quickly migrated to Europe and onward to North America across the Greenland-Norway landbridge.  After Greenland and Norway were permanently separated by ocean about 40 million years ago, Beringia still provided for North America and Eurasia to continue sharing their mutual rodent infestations.  In the Miocene, temporal landbridges or closely spaced islands allowed rodents to cross into Africa in large numbers.  But from Africa, they could not cross over to Madagascar until the ice ages lowered the sea level.  Therefore, Madagascar was free of rodents even while Africa swarmed with rodents for over 10 million years!  The same is true for New Guinea and Australia, which were entirely free of rodents until the ice ages lowered sea levels, thus creating opportunities for the rodents of Asia to island hop their way to the land down under.[6] 

     Hence, there is considerable evidence that rodents are in fact constrained by large oceans, and do not cross them much easier than any other type of terrestrial animal.  If they cannot cross oceans, even with their small and agile frame, and clinging claws, then how is it that larger animals crossed the oceans? 

          For these reasons, it is at least plausible to suppose that paranormal or extraterrestrial entities have transported creatures across continents.  Indeed, it may be the only likely explanation.

Read more about alien abduction in the fossil record.

The creationist narrative in Genesis 1 is contradicted by many ancient Christian texts.  Instead of an Almighty Creator God, ancient Christian texts espouse that the universe is born from blind arrogance and stupidity.  The angels caused evolution to occur from species to species.  There are many gods, (or aliens?), and the Christian God is just one among them.  Satan the Devil writes scripture, and thus the Bible was polluted with Genesis 1.  Archaeology and modern scholarship demonstrate that Genesis is indeed corrupted.  Cavemen walk with Adam and Eve.  Esoteric prophecies reveal the coming of Christ, and also reveal the dark forces that govern the cosmos.  Such are the ancient Christian writings.

Science vindicates the truth of these ideas.  Evolution often happens too fast for Darwin’s theory.  Gaps in the fossil record indicate that some kind of unnatural force acts together with natural selection.  Astrobiology reveals that intelligent life probably evolved long before us.  The fossil record reveals strange clues that aliens abducted species and transported them across oceans, and that DNA from diverse lineages was combined to spawn hybrid species.  Evidently, aliens influence evolution, and they are the gods of the world’s religions. 

This is not fiction.  All these facts are thoroughly documented in the links above.

---