Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by Philip Gosse, written in 1857 (two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species), in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is any act of creation inevitably made the world so that it would appear to be older than it is. Gosse's argument was that since living things had a cycle of reproduction and development, God must have created them in the act of developing, with trees having rings, and animals having skin, blood, and bones all making them appear older than they were. From any examination of a post-creation world, the world would appear to have been created in the cycle of normal processes, and would look old.