I Accept the Theory of Evolution

Very small marine organisms, such as plankton, are ideal for showing gradual evolutionary change. There are many billions of them, many with hard parts, and they conveniently fall directly to the seafloor after death, piling up in a continuous sequence of layers. Sampling the layers in order is easy: you can thrust a long tube into the seafloor, pull up a columnar core sample, and read it from bottom to top (our research institutes here in New Zealand do this routinely).

Come to New Zealand and you can see a two-hundred-meter-long core taken from the ocean floor near New Zealand, presenting an unbroken history of the evolution of the marine foraminiferan [i]Globorotalia conoidea[/i] over an eight-million-year period.

Or you might prefer the eighteen-meter-long core extracted near Antarctica, representing two million years of sediments, showing us, again in an unbroken history, the evolution of the radiolarian [i]Pseudocubus vema[/i]

Or perhaps you’d like to see my personal favourite… a core sample that shows an ancestral plankton species [i]Eucyrtidium calvertense[/i] dividing into two descendants from a common ancestor over 3.5 million years. The new species is [i]Eucyrtidium matuyamai[/i]