The Fossil Record: Evolution and/or Progressive Creation

You mean you'll leave professional researchers to their delusions because I don't have any. As a lay-person with limited understanding and knowledge of the subject I'm being entirely logical in trusting those with expert knowledge to inform me about these things.

When they change their (collective) opinion, so shall I.

Has science demonstrated that life arose by abiogenesis, yes or no?

Stating that 'science hasn't demonstrated that life arose by abiogenesis' isn't quite the same as saying it can never do so. It seems that researchers take this position?

And since I must be guided by the experts in that field, I will also reserve judgment.

I didn't catch your answer.  Was that a yes or no?  Has science demonstrated that life arose by abiogenesis?  It's a simple question.  Science either has or it hasn't.  Science has not demonstrated the existence of a multiverse (although many scientists still *believe* in a multiverse), but it has demonstrated that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that biological evolution has occurred on the earth, among other things.  What about abiogenesis?  Has science demonstrated that life arose on the earth by abiogenesis?  Yes or no?

Not to my knowledge.

It sounds like we're both in agreement

https://www.yahoo.com/news/60-million-old-seeds-reveal-215720135.html

Grapes have been intertwined with the story of humanity for millennia, providing the basis for wines produced by our ancestors thousands of years ago — but that may not have been the case if dinosaurs hadn’t disappeared from the planet, according to new research.

When an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago, it wiped out the massive, lumbering animals and set the stage for other creatures and plants to thrive in the aftermath.

Now, the discovery of fossilized grape seeds in Colombia, Panama and Peru that range from 19 million to 60 million years old is shedding light on how these humble fruits captured a foothold in Earth’s dense forests and eventually established a global presence. One of the newly discovered seeds is the oldest example of plants from the grape family to be found in the Western Hemisphere, according to a study on the specimens published Monday in the journal Nature Plants.

“These are the oldest grapes ever found in this part of the world, and they’re a few million years younger than the oldest ones ever found on the other side of the planet,” said lead study author Fabiany Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, in a statement. “This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really started to spread across the world.”

Much like the soft tissues of animals, actual fruits don’t preserve well in the fossil record. But seeds, which are more likely to fossilize, can help scientists understand what plants were present at different stages in Earth’s history as they reconstruct the tree of life and establish origin stories.

The oldest grape seed fossils found so far were unearthed in India and date back 66 million years, to about the time of the dinosaurs’ demise.

“We always think about the animals, the dinosaurs, because they were the biggest things to be affected, but the extinction event had a huge impact on plants too,” Herrera said. “The forest reset itself in a way that changed the composition of the plants.”

A difficult search
Herrera’s PhD advisor, Steven Manchester, who is also a senior author on the new study, published a paper about the grape fossils found in India. It inspired Herrera to question where other grape seed fossils might exist, like South America, although they had never been found there.

“Grapes have an extensive fossil record that starts about 50 million years ago, so I wanted to discover one in South America, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Herrera said. “I’ve been looking for the oldest grape in the Western Hemisphere since I was an undergrad student.”

Herrera and study coauthor Mónica Carvalho, assistant curator at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology, were doing fieldwork in the Colombian Andes in 2022 when Carvalho spotted a fossil. It turned out to be a 60 million-year-old grape seed fossil trapped in rock, among the oldest in the world and the first to be found in South America.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Fabiany, a grape!’ And then I looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so exciting,” Herrera said.

Although the fossil was tiny, its shape, size and other features helped the duo identify it as a grape seed. And once they were back in the lab, the researchers carried out CT scans to study its internal structure and confirm their findings.

More importantly (for us), if the dinosaurs hadn't been wipedout it's quite likely that the mammals would have remained as a group of mostly nocturnal, burrowing scavengers and our ancient ancestors would not have arisen.