I love how not only the time of existence but also its size and appearance are presented as undisputable facts.
All evidence and models across a large variety of disciplines points to the age of the fossils. Geological strata, carbon isotope ratios, phylogenetics, etc.
Feel free to present your evidence so that we can weigh in.
That said, I can give you a tasty nugget if you want. I reject using uniformitarianism (ad infinitum) as a scientific axiom. And I scoff at the arrogance of my fellow academics, especially for presenting stories such as these as fact.
Using scare quotes like that makes me totally confused what you're trying to say. If it's
I'm simply criticizing what passes for science these days.
then why not say so. The scare quotes give an impression you have a problem with all science, not just bad science, which I don't think you meant.
For a discussion of how poisonous to meaning this practice of using scare quotes can be, see David Stove's chapter Neutralizing Success-Words, an analysis of leading 20th C philosophers of science doing it. http://nekhbet.com/popper/chapter-01.html part 3. It's extremely enlightening and pretty funny, as Stove always is.
Not to me, it looks like the normal use of scare quotes. You could swap it with so called science. Stuff that people call science, which is not.
If someone doesn't like any science, why would they care about a distinction between science and so called science?
If you don't like that, then you don't like scare quotes at all, but then what's the problem with saying "so called blah"?