Sea Turtles – Unchanged For Millions of Years? -by David Rives

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What some paleontologists choose to believe seems to defy logic. Let’s take leatherback sea turtles as an example. They say that they have remained unchanged since the age of the dinosaurs. I have to wonder…if I believed in evolution, and if I believed the Earth had gone through radical changes over the past 66 (plus) million years, and if I believed that these epochs of changes were so radical that dinosaurs and other groups of animals (including many ocean creatures) were completely wiped out, and if I believed that most every mammal from the elephant to the field mouse had evolved over that time, why would I accept that sea turtles would survive all of that without changing in some way? 66 million years is a long time.

In addition, sea turtles are not nearly the only survivors that exist in pretty much the same form as their fossil ancestors.

I find it much easier to accept that the creatures were designed in the beginning to thrive in specific ecosystems and environments.

The icing on the cake of this fabulous story of sea turtle survival and so-called “stasis” is that today, these animals are threatened, seemingly by man, no less.

We are led to believe that they survived millions of years, several mass extinctions, and oceans of predators, including mosasaurs and megalodons, only to now be in danger? Now there is no doubt that their numbers have decreased, and humans have played a role. In some Asian countries, sea turtle eggs as well as the turtles themselves are collected for food, medicine, or for their shells. Many times, a turtle will accidentally swim into fishing nets or other gear and get fatally injured. Commercial development on nesting beaches has probably affected them as well. We’re not questioning the fact that we need to protect and nurture God’s creation. The question is: How did they survive, unchanged, for tens of millions of years, only to be threatened in the last few hundred years?

These Leatherback Sea turtles are very well designed by the God of the Bible, and they’ve been swimming in the oceans since Creation Week.

They’re massive! Longer than a tall human—and if we look at the tough shell, (which is how the species got its name), it’s not like other turtles. The shell of the leatherback doesn’t have any hard, keratinized scutes. In fact, the shell is tough, rubbery, somewhat flexible, and lined with five longitudinal ridges. The leatherback can dive more than four times the depth of other sea turtles, and its special shell helps with this. The turtle can absorb nitrogen through its flexible shell, and those ridges that you see on the back aid in hydrodynamics, making the dives more energy efficient.

Just like we would design a submarine or a yacht so that it was sleek in the water, the ridges on the shell also reduce drag while swimming, which is great because the leatherback sea turtle swims amazing distances! Many of them migrate across the ocean to nest. The Western Pacific Leatherback feeds off the western coast of North America, ranging up into the Alaskan waters. But every two or three years, it journeys across the Pacific to the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. That is an incredible journey, especially for an air-breathing animal—the greatest migration, by far, of any reptile.

Ever since I was 8 years old, I’ve marveled at the giant Leatherback Sea Turtle, and I see the hand of the Creator in their brilliant design and engineering.

I’m David Rives…truly, the Heavens Declare the Glory of God.

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