The animal that confused scientists

By Ian Taylor, Creation Moments

Sometimes God’s imagination is so creative that even the scientists are stumped by the results. One such example is the colugo, an animal that scientists tried to place in three different families before they finally gave up and designated a whole new family just for that one strange creature.

Scientists agree that the colugo is a mammal. But beyond that, they’re stumped. For a while they had classified the colugo as a bat because it has a membrane that it uses for gliding. But upon closer inspection, it was clear that the colugo was not a bat. The colugo has both front and hind legs and a tail that are all used to stretch the membrane of the cat sized animal to a width of four feet. Based on this, scientists thought it might be a lemur with wings, so they classified the colugo as a primate. The strictly vegetarian colugo is not a lemur, however. So about 50 years ago, scientists decided to give the colugo its own classification – Dermoptera, meaning “skin wing.”

Scientists classify animals according to an imagined evolutionary history – the most popular school of thought today. This doesn’t prove evolution; it is simply arranging similar things together, just as kindergarten children do as they learn about different objects. But the colugo is such a testimony to God’s imaginative creativity that scientists have not been able to find anything that even remotely resembles this strange and wonderful creature.

Psalm 106:7

“Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the multitude of thy mercies; but provoked [him] at the sea, [even] at the Red sea.”