From the vault: German paleontologist Günter Bechly is co-author (with Stephen C. Meyer) of the chapter titled “The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry” in the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique.  In this second conversation with Sarah Chaffee on this topic, Bechly moves on from the Cambrian explosion to discuss “life’s second ‘big bang.’” He then touches on other biological explosions, including the Avalon explosion, the Triassic explosion, the origin of flowering plants, and the origin of placental mammals. “There’s no reasonable way,” Bechly concludes, “to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.”