Refuting Creationism - Ability to Perform Complex Tasks Had Already Evolved Before Chimps and Hominins Split

Male chimp cracking nuts.

Photo: Dora Biro.

Study shows that chimpanzees perform the same complex behaviours that have brought humans success | University of Oxford

Time and again, science is showing that characteristics which were once considered uniquely human, and therefore, according to creationists, evidence that humans are a special creation, distinct from all other animals, are in fact shared with other animals.

Instead of being evidence of unique creation, they are evidence of common origins and descent with modification.

On such human characteristic is the ability to perform complex tasks, involving tool use, in organised sequence, and adapt those sequences if necessary to complete the task. In other words, to plan a strategy for achieving a specific goal.

However, a new study has shown that chimpanzees also have this ability, suggesting it was present in the common ancestor before chimps and Hominins diverged some 6 million years ago.

Refuting Creationism - First Americans Were Killing Mammoths 3,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Clovis people hunting mammoth in Montana during the Ice Age

AI Generated (ChatGPT4o)

An artist’s reconstruction of Clovis life 13,000 years ago shows the Anzick-1 infant with his mother consuming mammoth meat near a hearth. Another individual crafts tools, including dart projectile points and atlatls. A mammoth butchery area is visible nearby. The scene is inspired by the La Prele mammoth site in Wyoming and set against the Montana landscape where the Anzick burial was discovered. Artist Eric Carlson created the scene in collaboration with archaeologists Ben Potter (UAF) and Jim Chatters (McMaster University).

Eric Carlson

Study reveals mammoth as key food source for ancient Americans | UAF news and information

A good 3,000 years before creationism's small god allegedly created the little flat planet with a dome over it described in the Bible, thinking that's what a universe looked like, human beings had migrated to North America and were hunting mammoths.

This is according to a new stable isotope analysis by a team led by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Creationists should note that a stable isotope analysis does not depend on radioactive decay rates, so the evidence-free claim that radioactive decay rates have changed isn't open to them. Stabel isotope analysis shows us what the person's diet consisted of.

The analysis was conducted by Professor Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and James Chatters of McMaster University, and their colleagues. Their findings are published, open access, in the journal Science Advances and is explained in a UAF new release:

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Got The Date of the Earliest Dinosaur Wrong - It Was Even Earlier

An artist’s rendering shows how Ahvaytum bahndooiveche may have appeared in a habitat dating to around 230 million years ago.

Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto

A University of Wisconsin Geology Museum field crew is seen here in 2016 prospecting for additional material at the site in Wyoming where fossils of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche were discovered in 2013. The researchers are Aaron Kufner (left) and Jennifer Lien.

Photo by David M. Lovelace.

Dinosaurs roamed the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to new analysis of the oldest North American fossils

The thing about science that distinguishes it from religion is the willingness to change its collective mind when the facts change. This is because science is led by the fact wherever they lead

Science is reasonable uncertainty religion is unreasonable certainty. Religion appeals to those who value certainty over truth, whereas science appeals to those who value truth above certainty.

And scientists have just changed their collective minds about where and when the first dinosaurs appeared.

The consensus had been that they first appeared on the southern end of the supercontinent Pangea before it split into Gondwana in the South and Laurasia in the north and only spread to Laurasia millions of years later.

What can you tell me about the ancient reptile, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, and its place in the evolution of dinosaurs? Ahvaytum bahndooiveche is a recently identified dinosaur species from the Late Triassic period, approximately 230 million years ago, discovered in what is now Wyoming, USA. This species is notable for being the oldest known dinosaur from the ancient northern supercontinent Laurasia, challenging previous beliefs that dinosaurs originated solely in the southern supercontinent Gondwana.

Discovery and Naming
The fossil remains of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche were uncovered in 2013 at the Garrett's Surprise locality within the Popo Agie Formation in Wyoming. The genus name "Ahvaytum" translates to "long ago," and the species name "bahndooiveche" means "water's young handsome man," a term used by the Eastern Shoshone to refer to both dinosaurs and colorful native salamanders. This naming honors the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, whose ancestral lands include the discovery site, and reflects a collaborative effort between researchers and Indigenous communities.

Physical Description
Ahvaytum bahndooiveche was a small dinosaur, estimated to be about 3 feet (0.91 meters) in length and 1 foot (0.30 meters) in height, comparable in size to a modern chicken but with a notably long tail. The fossil material includes fragmentary hindlimb bones, such as an isolated left astragalus and a partial left femur, suggesting it had progressed beyond the juvenile stage and was still slowly growing.

Evolutionary Significance
This discovery has significant implications for our understanding of dinosaur evolution. Prior to this find, it was believed that dinosaurs originated in Gondwana and later dispersed to Laurasia. The existence of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche in Laurasia during the same period as the earliest known southern dinosaurs indicates that dinosaurs were more widely distributed across the globe earlier than previously thought. This challenges the hypothesis of a delayed dinosaurian dispersal out of high-latitude Gondwana and suggests a more complex scenario for the early evolution and distribution of dinosaurs.

In summary, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche provides valuable insights into the early stages of dinosaur evolution, highlighting a broader and more rapid dispersal of these creatures across ancient Earth than was previously understood.

Refuting Creationism - Oldest-Known Evolutionary Arms Race in the Cambrian

Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Oldest-Known Evolutionary “Arms Race” in the Cambrian | AMNH

Examples of Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia showing holes made by a perforating predator. Scale bars represent 200 micrometers.

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Perhaps Creationism's designer god is just a slow learner.

Anyone with an intellect greater than that of a plank should be capable of understanding the utter futility and waste in an arms race in which the strategy is to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. Arms races only make sense as the result of a game plan in which you can't communicate with your opponent and have no way of telling what he or she is thinking and if they gain the upper-hand, you lose. The only safe choice is to up the stakes - and that goes for your opponent too.

It becomes even more incomprehensible if the person you're having the arms race with is yourself, unless you're an amnesic with multiple personality disorder, and yet, if we believe creationists, that's exactly what their putative designer god is doing constantly.

Everywhere we look in nature, organisms are competing with one another for resources, or because one is trying to exploit the other as a food source in a predator-prey relationship or as a parasite trying to live in or on another organism and even killing it or making it weak and sickly as a byproduct of its parasitism. And yet creationists insist there is only one designer designing both sides in these arms races.

For some unfathomable reason, creationists like to imagine the idea of a celestial idiot having arms races with itself in millions of relationships in nature is a much better explanation than these arms races being the inevitable result of mindless evolutionary processes where a slight improvement increases the chances of leaving descendants while reducing the chance of the opponent doing the same, so creating a selection pressure for the next twist in the spiral.

New Book - Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution

This book looks at the ID/Creationism vs evolution debate from multiple angles and analyses why the science of evolutionary biology refutes the childish notion of intelligent design.

I wrote it because, creationism is dangerous. It replaces evidence-based knowledge with superstition and creates the impression that cultural prejudice and ignorant incredulity are better measures of reality than observation, analysis and reason.

Now more than ever we need our politicians, law-makers and captains of industry to be able to make sense of complex data and use it to make wise decisions, not dismiss it as based on ‘flawed’ concepts and the result of conspiracies designed to turn people away from the ‘truth’ as revealed in ancient texts declared to be holy. As is clearly shown in the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document and in the wilful misrepresentations of science its fellows dutifully feed to the largely scientifically-illiterate public, there is a hidden political agenda that depends on people believing falsehoods and thinking anti-science is some sort of moral crusade to restore Western civilisation to a notional ideal golden age in pre-renaissance Europe when the slave trade was booming and witch-burning was a regular spectacle in the local town square.

This was a time when people like Copernicus and Galileo would be persecuted and deprived of their livelihood and even their life, for revealing the empirical evidence that Earth orbits the sun – not because they had falsified the data but because the data falsified the Bible. The sacred superstitions, even though empirically proved wrong, had to be defended against the truth as revealed by the physical data.

Common Origins - How The Mammalian Outer Ear Evolved - From Our Ancestral Fish Gills

An earful of gill: USC Stem Cell study points to the evolutionary origin of the mammalian outer ear | USC Stem Cell

I'm sorry if this spoils a creationists new year, but a bunch of scientists from the Stem Cell Lab of the University of Southern California have just published a paper showing an ancient ancestor of mammals, including of course us humans, was a fish.

It comes in the form of evidence that our outer ear develops from the same tissues in the embryo as the gills of fish. These tissues have been exapted by evolution for many new structures, one of which is the outer ear of mammals.

Refuting Creationism - Jaw-Dropping Evolution in Reptiles

An anole - a species of ‘false chameleon’ - crushing a snail with its jaws.

Professor Anthony Herrel

December: Jaw evolution in lizards and snakes | News and features | University of Bristol

A research team from Bristol University, UK with Professor Anthony Herrel of the Mécanismes Adaptatifs et Evolution, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France has recently published a paper showing the close link between the lower jaw shape of lizards and snakes, known collectively as the lepidosaurs, and their ecological niche as well as factors such as their phylogeny and scaling for body size (allometry).

They found that evolution was rapid in specialised groups such as burrowing and aquatic species.

Malevolent Design - The Sneak Tactics of Toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii.

Image by Michael Holmes

Toxoplasma gondii parasite uses unconventional method to make proteins for evasion of drug treatment

Here we are with yet another example of an organism that, if there is a designer behind it, that designer can only be described as malevolent and determined to maximise the suffering and misery in the world.

It is, of course, another example of a nasty little parasite which, if you subscribe to the creationist view that complexity 'proves' design, has been designed to ensure we are as vulnerable to is as possible by helping it evade the immune system and other mechanisms, supposedly designed by the same designer god to protect us from the parasites it designs to harm us.

This example is the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which is notorious for manipulating its natural victims, which are felines and their prey species. For example, mice infected with T. gondii lose their fear of cats so they get eten and the parasite gets into its primary host; infected chimpanzees develop a liking for the smell of leopard urine.

Humans are not the natural secondary host, but the parasite readily infects us as we catch it from cats. It is thought that about one third of humans are infected. Once infected it is impossible to get rid of from the body because, even if antibodies are produced by our immune system, the parasites go into a dormant state as cysts which can form in any organs of the body, including the brain.

Refuting Creationism - Ritual Gatherings in a Cave in Israel - 25,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of a ritual gathering in Manot Cave

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Manot Cave, Israel

Earliest deep-cave ritual compound in Southwest Asia discovered The Daily The Daily

Clearly, the authors of the creation myths in Genesis had no knowledge of their own history let alone the history of the rest of the world, as 25,000 years before the time in which they set their 'creation week', there were people holding ritual gatherings in a cave in what is now Israel.

Before the mythical 'creation week' there was supposedly no Earth, no Universe, no living beings and only a god made of nothing which had self-assembled out of nothing according to a design it made before it existed.

Creationists reason that the Universe and life on Earth is too complex to have arisen spontaneously, and it couldn't have all come from nothing, so an even more complex god must have arisen spontaneously out of nothing first then created everything else out of nothing by magic. To a child-like creationists there is no possible flaw in that reasoning.

Refuting Creationism - Another Gap Closed - No God Found

A mating pair of wild-type (left) and mir-193 mutant (right) Bicyclus anynana butterflies.

Photo credit: Shen TIAN

A mating pair of peppered moths, Biston betularia, showing the melanistic and pale forms.

A microRNA solves an evolutionary mystery of butterfly and moth wing colouration - NUS Faculty of Science | NUS Faculty of Science

A regularly-cited example of observed Darwinian evolution is that of the peppered moth which occurs in two forms, the white, speckled form and a melanistic, almost black form. During the industrial revolution, as English northern towns grew and became polluted by smoke from coal-burning factories, so the melanistic form became more common.

Experiments showed that the lighter form became easier for predators to see when the moths were roosting on tree trunks that had become coated in soot, while the melanistic form became harder for predators to see.

Following the decline of the northern towns, the light form again increased back to the former ratio, showing the importance of environmental change in evolution.

This tendency to have melanistic forms is common in the lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) and this tendency was believed to be under th control of as single genomic region surrounding the protein-coding gene “cortex“, common across many species, showing their descent from a common ancestor.

However, new research by international researchers from Singapore, Japan, and the United States of America, led by Professor Antónia MONTEIRO and Dr Shen TIAN from the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has shown that 'cortex' is not directly involved in producing melanism, instead, this is controlled by a microRNA from within the 'cortex' genomic region, as another example of how microRNA's control many functions within cells, particular gene expression.

Refuting Creationism - Domesticated Dogs 2000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

A tibia, or lower-leg bone, of an adult canine from Swan Point, Alaska, radiocarbon dated to about 12,000 years old.

François Lanoë
School of Anthropology

Eurasian/North American Grey Wolf, Canis lupus.

By User:Mas3cf - This file was derived from: Eurasian wolf.JPG, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

How did humans and dogs become friends? Connections in the Americas began 12,000 years ago | University of Arizona News

At least 2,000 years before Creationists' little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, human in Alaska were feeding domesticated dogs on salmon, according to the findings of palaeontologists from the University of Arizona.

But of course, the parochial Bronze Age pastoralists from the infancy of our species who made up that myth, couldn't possibly have known anything about when dogs were domesticated, or Alaska for that matter because, as we can see from the tales they made up, they knew nothing of the world beyond a day or two's walk from their pastures and were completely ignorant of the geography, geology and history of the planet and life on it - which is why they made up such implausible origin myths in the first place.

That there were people feeding salmon to their domesticated dogs about 12,000 years ago is the subject of a paper published recently in Science Advances by the Arizona University team led by Assistant Professor François Lanoë, of the School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. They explain their findings in an Arizona University News release

Refuting Creationism - How the 'Lizard' Part of Your Brain Influences Your Thinking

In a new Northwestern Medicine study, scientists sought to better understand how humans evolved to become so skilled at thinking about what’s happening in other peoples’ minds.

Amygdala is the organ in the limbic system (inner mind) —though a tiny little one is significantly responsible for our emotions which falls in the bracket of implicit memories.

Overthinking what you said? It’s your ‘lizard brain’ talking to newer, advanced parts of your brain: For Journalists - Northwestern University

Few things upset creationists more than evidence that they are not only apes and share a common ancestor with the other African apes, but that they also share a common ancestor even with non-mammals such as reptiles, and yet, as the American evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky reminds us, nothing in biology makes sense without the Theory of Evolution (TOE).

And one thing that does make sense is how the human brain is the result of an evolutionary process with ancestry in those common ancestors, including lizards.

A second thing that creationists who have deluded themselves into believing that mainstream biomedical scientists are giving up on the TOE and adopting the childish notion of intelligent design, will find distressing, is the news that the team who did this piece of research are firmly convinced that the structure of our brain and the way it works is the result of evolution, not magic.

The third thing is how this explains empathy, of which creationists often feign ignorance, claiming they get their sense of right and wrong from their invisible friend and have a handbook to tell them how to behave. The curious belief that even influenced supposed Christian intellectual 'giants' such as the smugly self-satisfied, C.S. Lewis, is despite the fact that one of the Golden Rules of human society, that even the founder of Christianity, Jesus, allegedly told his followers to apply - "Do unto others what you would they do unto you" or words to that effect, depend entirely on having the empathetic ability to know what someone else would want.

The research explains how this ability in humans comes from an ancestral ability to read social signals and form relationships, including an understanding of social hierarchies, possessed even by lizards.

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Using Fire in Tasmania, 41,000 Years Ago

Indigenous Australians using fire to hunt kangaroos.

Painting by Joseph Lycett, ca. 1817.
Source: National Library of Australia.

Emerald Swamp, Tasmania.

Credit: Simon Haberle

Study uncovers earliest evidence of humans using fire to shape the landscape of Tasmania | University of Cambridge

One of creationism's many problems is that being a counter-factual superstition it is easy to refute with facts. For example, trying to cling to the childish belief that the Universe and Earh are both between 6 and 10,000 years old, must be difficult in view of all the evidence of things happening on Earth before then - like people using fire in Tasmania 41,000 years ago.

But, as though to illustrate how creationism is not science but superstition, creationists have a knee-jerk response to that sort of news by simply shrugging their shoulders and declaring that the scientists have either lied, misunderstood the data or failed to recognise that their dating method must be wrong because it doesn't agree with creationists.

The evidence, of course, comes not only from dating the charcoal found in mud, which shows us that people used fire to clear the land, but the sudden change in the pollen found in the same mud at the same time as the charcoal appears, showing how the vegetation was destroyed by fire to be replaced with other flora. This was discovered by a team of researchers from the UK and Australia, who published their findings, open access, recently in the journal, Science, and explained it in a University of Cambridge, press release.

Malevolent Design - How Malaria Is Being Redesigned to Keep On Killing Children

Photomicrograph of a blood smear contains a macro- and microgametocyte of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite

Photo Credit: CDC/Dr. Mae Melvin - This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL) #2704, Public Domain, Link

Study uncovers first evidence of resistance to standard malaria treatment in African children with severe malaria

In another twist of the arms race with human medical science Plasmodium falciparum, the malevolently designed parasite that causes malaria and kills hundreds of thousands of children a year, mostly in Africa, has developed resistance to Artemisinin. Scientists were already aware that resistance had arisen in cases of uncomplicated malaria, but this is the first such incidence of resistance in the more severe form of the disease.

Indiana University School of Medicine researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at Makerere University in Uganda have discovered a case of complicated malaria in a child in Uganda.

Mallevolent Design - How Salmonella Sneaks Past Our Defences To Make Us Sick

Salmonella infects the small intestine and alters the colon environment

Intestinal lumen

New study shows how salmonella tricks gut defenses to cause infection

There is a simple paradox at the heart of creationism that I have never even seen an attempt to resolve. It all comes from two beliefs: there is only one designer god capable of designing living organisms and that designer god designed us complete with our immune system with which we can attempt to resist attack by pathogens, and that pathogens are not the work of this design, but are the result of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' since Adam & Eve let 'sin' into the world. The fact that Michael J. Behe, who invented that excuse, has let slip that ID Creationism is Bible literalism in a lab coat seems to be lost on his followers who still dutifully insist that it is a scientific alternative to evolution and should be taught in school science class (presumably now with the tale of Adam & Eve taught as real history and 'sin' as a real force in science).

The paradox is, did the designer god give Adam & Eve an immune system, or did it design an upgrade when 'sin' allowed pathogens to exist? If the former, it was anticipating and planning for the so-called 'fall'; if the latter, it lacked foresight so is not omniscient.

But however creationists resolve this paradox they still have to explain why the 'intelligently designed' immune system doesn't work very well and why whatever is designing pathogens seems to be able to overcome it.

The nonsense about 'sin', 'the fall', etc., is trivially easy to refute because any improvement in a parasite's ability to parasitise its host can't possibly be regarded as a devolution from some assumed initial perfection because an improvement can't be worse that what it's an improvement on. The whole nonsense of 'devolution' is biological gobbledygook, intelligently designed to appeal to scientifically illiterate simpletons who want to fit the Bible superstition somewhere in the reasoning without bothering too much about the logic or the biology.

So, the paradox boils down to why an intelligent designer would be having an arms race with itself so the parasites it creates can continue to parasitise the victims it creates complete with their immune system it created to stop them. Creationists normally flee in terror at the mere mention of arms races, which is why you'll never see them discussed in the cult literature apart from where pathogens are waved aside as 'caused by sin', blah, blah, blah...
So, it would be refreshing indeed to see a genuine attempt by an intelligent design creationist try to give some rational explanation, and hopefully without giving away the fact that ID creationism is merely Christian fundamentalism in disguise, for the discovery by a new UC Davis Health study that shows how the Salmonella bacteria, a major cause of food poisoning, can invade the gut even when protective bacteria are present.

As an added embarrassment for creationists, Salmonella is closely related to Escherichia coli (E.coli) that they usually cite Michael J. Behe as 'proving' it must have been designed by their god because its flagellum is 'irreducibly complex'.

First a little AI background information about Salmonella, where it came from and what it does to us:

Transitional Form News - Precambrian Common Ancestor of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematode Worms

3D laser scans enable the researchers to study the fossils’ shape and curvature.

Droser Lab/UCR

Researchers Scott Evans (left) and Ian Hughes examine a fossil bed at Nilpena Ediacara National Park.

Droser Lab/UCR.

Tiny worm makes for big evolutionary discovery | UCR News | UC Riverside

The refutation of creationism continues today with news of another one of those 'non-existent' transitional species that turn up with monotonous regularity only to be dismissed by creationists as 'not transitional but fully formed' with now two gaps in the record where there was originally one, or by simply dismissing the dating method as unreliable and coincidentally wrong by an order of magnitude sufficient to make 6-10,000 years look like x-million years.
Another big disappointment for creationists is the fact that this one is from before the Cambrian when their traditional disinformation claims lots of species popped into existence without ancestors by magic in a single event called the 'Cambrian explosion'. The Cambrian 'explosion' was of course a period of some 6-10 million years during which many of the basic body plans of multicellular organisms evolved.

This fossil however was before then and was clearly the ancestral stem species from which a whole range of Cambrian organism, collectively known as Ecdysozoa evolved. These are a group of organisms with an outer cuticle which is shed periodically as the organism grows. The vast group includes nematode worms and arthropods such as insects, spiders, crustaceans like crabs, shrimps, lobsters, and the horseshow crab. So, this discovery, which the palaeontologists have named Uncus dzaugisi sits at the base of this branch of the evolutionary tree. It resembled a nematode worm.

Tell me all about the Ecdysozoa, please. Ecdysozoa is a major clade of animals within the larger group known as Protostomia, distinguished by their unique mode of growth, which involves periodic moulting of an external cuticle. The term "ecdysozoa" comes from the Greek word ecdysis, meaning "to strip off" or "to shed," referring to this moulting process.

Characteristics of Ecdysozoa

1. Moulting (Ecdysis):
   • The defining feature of Ecdysozoans is the shedding of their cuticle—a tough, non-living outer layer made of proteins, polysaccharides (like chitin), or collagen. This process allows them to grow, as the rigid cuticle limits continuous size increase.
   • After moulting, a new, larger cuticle is secreted, which hardens over time.
2. Body Structure:
   • Many have a hydrostatic skeleton, relying on fluid pressure in their body cavity for movement and structure.
   • Most lack cilia or flagella in their adult form, distinguishing them from other protostomes.
3. Diversity:
   • The group includes some of the most diverse and abundant organisms on Earth, ranging from microscopic species to large, visible ones.
4. Nervous System:
   • Typically, they have a ventral nerve cord and a dorsal brain, with varied sensory adaptations.

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Major Groups Within Ecdysozoa
Ecdysozoa includes eight phyla, with two of the most well-known being Arthropoda and Nematoda:

1. Arthropoda
   • The largest and most diverse group of animals, including insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods.
   • They have segmented bodies, jointed appendages, and a hard exoskeleton.
   • Examples: Butterflies, crabs, spiders, centipedes.
2. Nematoda (Roundworms)
   • Microscopic to macroscopic worms with a cylindrical, unsegmented body.
   • Found in nearly every habitat on Earth, often as parasites in plants and animals.
   • Examples: Caenorhabditis elegans (a model organism), Ascaris (a human intestinal parasite).
3. Tardigrada (Water Bears)
   • Microscopic, water-dwelling animals known for their extreme resilience to harsh environments.
   • They can survive desiccation, radiation, and even the vacuum of space.
4. Onychophora (Velvet Worms)
   • Segmented, soft-bodied terrestrial animals with slime glands used for capturing prey.
5. Priapulida
   • Marine worms with a tubular body, often found burrowing in sediment.
6. Kinorhyncha
   • Tiny, segmented marine animals often referred to as "mud dragons."
7. Loricifera
   • Microscopic animals inhabiting marine sediment, with a complex, retractable body.
8. Nematomorpha (Horsehair Worms)
   • Parasites as larvae, often controlling the behaviour of their insect hosts.

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Evolution and Phylogeny

• Ecdysozoa was proposed as a clade in 1997, based on molecular evidence (notably studies of ribosomal RNA).
• They share a common ancestor with other protostomes but diverged early to adopt their unique moulting strategy.
• Their evolutionary success is evident in their sheer numbers and adaptability, especially in arthropods.

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Ecological and Economic Importance

1. Ecological Roles:
   • Many ecdysozoans are key components of ecosystems as decomposers, predators, prey, and parasites.
   • Insects, a subgroup of arthropods, are critical for pollination and nutrient cycling.
2. Economic Impact:
   • Beneficial: Insects (e.g., bees) aid in agriculture, while nematodes play a role in soil health.
   • Harmful: Some ecdysozoans are pests or parasites causing diseases in humans, animals, and crops.

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Fun Facts

• Tardigrades can enter a state called cryptobiosis, surviving for decades without water or food.
• Arthropods are the most successful phylum, with over a million described species, and likely many more undiscovered.
• Nematodes may account for about 80% of individual animals on Earth.

The discovery was made by a team from University of California, Riverside (UCR), led by Professor Mary Droser a distinguished professor of geology. The have explained their findings in the journal, Current Biology, and in a UCR press release:

Tiny worm makes for big evolutionary discovery

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UC Riverside scientists have described ‘Uncus,’ the oldest ecdysozoan and the first from the Precambrian period

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Everyone has a past. That includes the millions of species of insects, arachnids, and nematode worms that make up a major animal group called the Ecdysozoa. Until recently, details about this group’s most distant past have been elusive. But a UC Riverside-led team has now identified the oldest known ecdysozoan in the fossil record and the only one from the Precambrian period. Their discovery of Uncus dzaugisi, a worm-like creature rarely over a few centimeters in length, is described in a paper published today in Current Biology.

Scientists have hypothesized for decades that this group must be older than the Cambrian, but until now its origins have remained enigmatic. This discovery reconciles a major gap between predictions based on molecular data and the lack of described ecdysozoans prior to the rich Cambrian fossils record and adds to our understanding of the evolution of animal life.

Mary L. Droser, co-author Earth and Planetary Sciences University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA , USA.

The ecdysozoans are the largest and most species-rich animal group on Earth, encompassing more than half of all animals. Characterized by their cuticle — a tough external skeleton that is periodically shed — the group comprises three subgroups: nematodes, which are microscopic worms; arthropods, which include insects, spiders, and crustaceans; and scalidophora, an eclectic group of small, scaly marine creatures.

Like many modern-day animal groups, ecdysozoans were prevalent in the Cambrian fossil record and we can see evidence of all three subgroups right at the beginning of this period, about 540 million years ago. We know they didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and so the ancestors of all ecdysozoans must have been present during the preceding Ediacaran period.

Ian V. Hughes, first author
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

DNA-based analyses, used to predict the age of animal groups by comparing them with their closest living relatives, have corroborated this hypothesis. Yet ecdysozoan fossil animals have remained hidden among scores of animal fossils paleontologists have discovered from the Ediacaran Period.

Top: Uncus fossil from Nilpena Ediacara National Park. The numbers correspond to the coordinates of this fossil on the fossil bed surface. Bottom: 3D laser scans enable the researchers to study the fossils’ shape and curvature.

Droser Lab/UCR.

Ediacaran animals, which lived 635-538 million years ago, were ocean dwellers; their remains preserved as cast-like impressions on the seabed that later hardened to rock. Hughes said uncovering them is a labor-intensive, delicate process that involves peeling back rock layers, flipping them over, dusting them off, and piecing them back together to get “a really nice snapshot of the sea floor.”

This excavation process has only been done at Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia, a site Droser and her team have been working at for 25 years that is known for its beautifully preserved Ediacaran fossils.

Nilpena is perhaps the best fossil site for understanding early animal evolution in the world because the fossils occur during a period of heightened diversity and we are able to excavate extensive layers of rock that preserve these snapshots. The layer where we found Uncus is particularly exciting because the sediment grains are so small that we really see all the details of the fossils preserved there.

Assistant Professor Scott Evans, co-author
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA.

While the team didn’t set out to find an early ecdysozoan during their 2018 excavation, they were drawn to a mysterious worm-like impression that they dubbed “fishhook.”

Sometimes we make dramatic discoveries and sometimes we excavate an entire bed and say ‘hmmm, I’ve been looking at that thing, what do you think?’ That’s what happened here. We had all sort of noticed this fishhook squiggle on the rock. It was pretty prominent because it was really, really deep.

Because it was deep, we knew it wasn’t smooshed easily so it must have had a pretty rigid body. At this point we knew this was a new fossil animal and it belong to the Ecdysozoa.

Ian V. Hughes

After seeing more of the worm-like squiggles the team paid closer attention, taking note of fishhook’s characteristics. Other defining characteristics include its distinct curvature and the fact that it could move around — seen by trace fossils in the surrounding area. Paul De Ley, an associate professor of nematology at UCR, confirmed its fit as an early nematode and ruled out other worm types.

The team called the new animal Uncus, which means “hook” in Latin, noting in the paper its similarities to modern-day nematodes. Hughes said the team was excited to find evidence of what scientists had long predicted; that ecdysozoans existed in the Ediacaran Period.

It’s also really important for our understanding of what these early animal groups would have looked like and their lifestyle, especially as the ecdysozoans would really come to dominate the marine ecosystem in the Cambrian.

Ian V. Hughes

The paper is titled “An Ediacaran bilateran with an ecdysozoan affinity from South Australia.” Funding for the research came from NASA.

Highlights

• A new, motile bilaterian is described from the Ediacaran of South Australia
• Features including morphology and movement suggest an ecdysozoan affinity
• This discovery firmly places ecdysozoans in the Precambrian

Summary
Molecular clocks and Cambrian-derived metazoans strongly suggest a Neoproterozoic origin of many animal clades.^1,2,3,4 However, fossil bilaterians are rare in the Ediacaran, and no definitive ecdysozoan body fossils are known from the Precambrian. Notably, the base of the Cambrian is characterized by an abundance of trace fossils attributed to priapulid worms,^5,6 suggesting that major divisions among ecdysozoan groups occurred prior to this time. This is supported by ichnofossils from the latest Ediacaran or early Cambrian left by a plausible nematoid,^7,8,9 although definitively attributing this inferred behavior to crown-Nematoida remains contentious in the absence of body fossils.¹⁰ Given the high probability of the evolution of Ecdysozoa in the Proterozoic, the otherwise prolific fossil record of the Ecdysozoa, and the identification of more than 100 distinct Ediacaran genera, it is striking that no Ediacaran body fossils have been confidently assigned to this group. Here, we describe Uncus dzaugisi gen. et. sp. nov. from the Ediacara Member (South Australia), a smooth, vermiform organism with distinct curvature and anterior-posterior differentiation. The depth of relief of Uncus is unique among Ediacara fossils and consistent with a rigid outer cuticle. Ecological relationships and associated trace fossils demonstrate that Uncus was motile. Body morphology and the inferred style of movement are consistent with Nematoida, providing strong evidence for at least an ecdysozoan affinity. This validates the Precambrian origin of Ecdysozoa, reconciling a major gap between predicted patterns of animal evolution and the fossil record.⁴

Hughes, Ian V.; Evans, Scott D.; Droser, Mary L.
An Ediacaran bilaterian with an ecdysozoan affinity from South Australia
Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.030

© 2024 Elsevier.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

I think my favourite quote from one of the scientists is "We know they didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and so the ancestors of all ecdysozoans must have been present during the preceding Ediacaran period", which just about describes the difference between someone who knows the Theory of Evolution is correct because he understands the evidence for it, and a creationists who believes in fully formed living organisms made from nothing, magically popping into existence from nowhere, with magic spells cast by an unproven supernatural deity their mummy and daddy told them about.

The ancestral form, the transitional species, was in exactly for rock formation of exactly the right age which the theory of evolutionary decent with modifiction from a common ancester predicted.

And in case a creationist is tempted to try the 'radiometric dating is flawed/wrong/faked fallacy. The Ediacaran rock formation these fossils were found in was independently dated several different ways that all converged on a 98-million-year span from 635 to 538 million years ago known as the Ediacaran. The Most important being the Uranium-Lead (U-Pb) dating of zircons found in the layers of volcanic ash sandwiched within the rocks. To compress 600 million years of radioactive decay into less than 6-10,000 years would have caused Earth's rocks to melt and the seas to boil away. And the weak nuclear force would have been so weak that atoms could not have formed, let alone life, and there would have been no planet and no universe to fine tune for it either.

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Common Ancestry - Ancient Choanoflagellates Genes Used To Make A Mouse

Electron micrograph of the choanoflagellate, Salpingoeca.

By Sergey Karpov - http://www.choano.org/wiki/Choanoflagellate_Gallery#Salpingoeca_sp._Gallery, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Choanoflagellates, singly and as a colony.

Scientists recreate mouse from gene older than animal life - Queen Mary University of London

If there is one thing designed to get creationists chanting 'Common Designer!' it's evidence of the same gene doing the same thing in lots of different organisms, no matter how distantly related they are.

But when that gene is needed because of a basic design blunder long ago in the evolution of multicellular organisms, that chant looks increasingly forlorn.

For example, scientists have just shown how SOX and POU genes isolated from a single-celled choanoflagellate can be used to convert a mouse cell to function as the stem cell to clone another mouse. The reason this works is because something needs to reset the epigenetic setting in specialised cells. In a multicellular organism like a mouse, this effectively means any cell produced after the first few cell divisions of the fertilised zygote.

But why would a single-celled organism like a choanoflagellate need to do that? The answer it that epigenetics originally evolved to make an organism more able to respond to environmental changes and stresses.

Refuting Creationism - How Pterosaurs Evolved

Life restoration of two Skiphosoura bavarica in flight.

Credit: Gabriel Ugueto.

AI-generated image.

New fossil discovery reveals key step in the evolution of flying reptiles - Queen Mary University of London

Although creationists insist dinosaurs coexisted with humans before their god launched his genocidal flood, and even twist words like 'behemoth' in the Bible to try to show how the authors of genesis were familiar with dinosaurs (as though there was only one species) what they never explain is why the same authors said nothing at all about the pterodactyls that were contemporaneous with dinosaurs.

The real reason is of course that pterodactyls and dinosaurs lived in that vast expanse of time before 'Creation Week' when 99.9975% of everything that happened on Earth happened.

The evidence for this can be found in any palaeontological article that deals with the evolution of these first flying vertebrates, like this one about the discovery of a new species, Skiphosoura bavarica, which is also helping to understand how these reptiles evolved. It was identified by a team led by Dr David Hone, a palaeontologist from Queen Mary University of London. Early pterosaurs had a wingspan of about 2 meters (6 feet) but they evolved into massive creatures with wing spans up to 10 meters (30 feet). On the ground, some of them may have been at tall as a giraffe!

Pterosaurs, their evolution, and their relationship to dinosaurs. Pterosaurs were a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era, from the late Triassic (about 228 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous (66 million years ago). They were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight and were remarkable for their diversity in size, morphology, and ecological niches. Here's a detailed overview of pterosaurs, their evolution, and their relationship to dinosaurs:

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1. Evolutionary Origins
   
   • Pterosaurs belonged to the clade Pterosauria, which is part of the larger group Archosauria, making them close relatives of dinosaurs and crocodilians.
   • Their exact evolutionary origins are debated, but they likely evolved from small, ground-dwelling or arboreal reptiles within the clade Avemetatarsalia, which also includes dinosaurs and birds.
   • Early pterosaurs, such as Eudimorphodon and Dimorphodon, appeared in the late Triassic and already exhibited the characteristic wing structure.
2. Anatomy and Adaptations for Flight
   
   • Pterosaurs' wings were formed by a membrane of skin, muscle, and other tissues stretched along an elongated fourth finger, which supported the main wing structure.
   • Other adaptations included:
     • Lightweight skeletons with hollow bones to reduce weight.
     • Keel-like breastbones to anchor powerful flight muscles.
     • Complex cranial crests in some species, possibly for display or aerodynamic purposes.
     • Unique respiratory adaptations with air sacs similar to those in modern birds.
3. Relationship to Dinosaurs
   
   • Pterosaurs and dinosaurs share a common ancestor, but they are distinct groups within Archosauria. Pterosaurs are not considered dinosaurs.
   • The distinction lies in their lineage: dinosaurs belong to the clade Dinosauria, while pterosaurs form their own separate clade.
4. Diversity and Evolutionary Trends
   
   • Pterosaurs diversified into two main groups:
     1. Rhamphorhynchoids (Early Pterosaurs):
        • Typically small to medium-sized.
        • Long tails with a vane or rudder-like structure at the tip.
        • Examples: Rhamphorhynchus, Dimorphodon.
        • Lived during the Triassic and Jurassic periods.
     2. Pterodactyloids (Advanced Pterosaurs):
        • Larger body sizes, including giants like Quetzalcoatlus with wingspans exceeding 10 meters.
        • Short tails or no tails.
        • Adapted to various ecological roles, such as fish-eating, filter-feeding, and scavenging.
        • Examples: Pteranodon, Istiodactylus, Quetzalcoatlus.
        • Dominated the skies during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
5. Ecological Roles
   
   • Pterosaurs occupied diverse ecological niches:
     • Some were piscivores, using long, pointed jaws to catch fish.
     • Others were filter feeders, like Pterodaustro, which had bristle-like teeth.
     • Large pterosaurs may have been scavengers or predators of small terrestrial animals.
     • Their crests may have been used for sexual selection, thermoregulation, or species recognition.
6. Extinction
   
   • Pterosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period during the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, likely caused by the asteroid impact and subsequent environmental changes.
   • Birds, which evolved from theropod dinosaurs, survived and continued to dominate the skies, taking over many of the ecological niches once held by pterosaurs.
7. Fossil Evidence
   
   • Pterosaur fossils are relatively rare due to their fragile skeletons, but significant discoveries have been made worldwide, revealing exquisite details of their anatomy and even soft tissues like wing membranes and pycnofibers (hair-like structures covering their bodies).

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Key Distinctions from Dinosaurs

• Dinosaurs were primarily terrestrial, with a diverse range of locomotion and body plans, whereas pterosaurs were adapted for flight.
• Birds are considered modern-day dinosaurs (descendants of theropods), but they are not descended from pterosaurs.

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Pterosaurs are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation, showcasing how vertebrates conquered the skies long before birds. Their fossils continue to provide insights into the complexity of prehistoric life and the adaptive potential of ancient reptiles.

Dr Hone's team have published their findings in the journal Current Biology and describe it in a Queen Mary University news release:

New fossil discovery reveals key step in the evolution of flying reptiles

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A remarkable new fossil discovery is shedding light on how flying reptiles, known as pterosaurs, evolved from their early forms into the later giants that ruled prehistoric skies.

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The new species, named Skiphosoura bavarica, was identified by a team led by Dr David Hone, a palaeontologist from Queen Mary University of London. Their findings were published today in the journal Current Biology.

The pterosaurs, close relatives of dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight. While early species typically had wingspans of about 2 metres, later pterosaurs evolved into enormous forms with wingspans reaching 10 metres. The discovery of Skiphosoura bavarica provides critical insights into how these transformations occurred.

Hailing from southern Germany, Skiphosoura boasts a rare, nearly complete skeleton preserved in three dimensions—a significant contrast to the often-flattened fossils of its relatives. Measuring about 2 metres in wingspan, the new species’ most striking feature is its short, stiff, sword-like tail, which inspired its name: “sword tail from Bavaria.”

This is an incredible find. It really helps us piece together how these amazing flying animals lived and evolved. Hopefully, this study will inspire more research into this important evolutionary transition.

Dr. David William Elliott Hone, lead author, School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London, UK.

For two centuries, scientists divided pterosaurs into two major groups: early non-pterodactyloids, characterised by short heads, long tails, and specific wing and toe structures, and the later pterodactyloids, which had larger heads, shorter tails, and other adaptations for efficient flight. Intermediate species, like the Darwinopterus discovered in the 2010s, showed how the head and neck evolved first. Skiphosoura represents a critical step beyond the Darwinopterus. Its head and neck resemble the more advanced pterodactyloids, while its wrist, tail, and foot show transitional features. These traits help trace the gradual adaptations that allowed later pterosaurs to grow to massive sizes. The study also reconstructed the evolutionary family tree of pterosaurs, placing Skiphosoura between Darwinopterus and true pterodactyloids. Additionally, a Scottish pterosaur named Dearc was identified as a key intermediate between early pterosaurs and Darwinopterus. Together, these findings form a near-complete evolutionary sequence for pterosaurs, detailing how their anatomy changed over time. The discovery was made possible through the efforts of an international team. Adam Fitch, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlighted the significance of Skiphosoura:

Pterosaurs have long been symbols of the unique life of the past. Skiphosoura represents an important new form for working out pterosaur evolutionary relationships and how this lineage arose and changed.

Adam Fitch, co-author
University of Wisconsin-Madison UW Geology Museum, Madison, WI, USA.

Having worked on over 60 pterosaurs from the Solnhofen limestone, it became clear during preparation that this fossil displayed features from both major groups of pterosaurs, with the shortened tail being a crucial diagnostic trait.

Stefan Selzer, co-author
Grabenäcker 12, Hemhofen, Germany.

Bruce and René Lauer of the Lauer Foundation, who contributed to the project, underscored the importance of modern techniques such as UV photography in uncovering fine details of the specimen.

We are proud to bring this important specimen to science and further the understanding of pterosaur evolution.

Bruce Lauer, co-author
Lauer Foundation for Paleontology, Science and Education
Wheaton, IL, USA.

With its blend of cutting-edge research, meticulous preparation, and international collaboration, the study of Skiphosoura bavarica offers a significant leap forward in understanding the evolutionary journey of these extraordinary flying reptiles.

Highlights

• A new pterosaur, Skiphosoura bavarica, is named from the Jurassic of Germany
• The specimen is much larger than other known forms and is preserved in three dimensions
• The Skiphosoura helps document the transition from early pterosaurs to the pterodactyloids
• The tail is short but retains the supporting structures of earlier forms

Summary For over a century, there was a major gap in our understanding of the evolution of the flying Mesozoic reptiles, the pterosaurs, with a major morphological gap between the early forms and the derived pterodactyloids.¹ Recent discoveries have found a cluster of intermediate forms that have the head and neck of the pterodactyloids but the body of the early grade,² yet this still leaves fundamental gaps between these intermediates and both earlier and more derived pterosaurs. Here, we describe a new and large Jurassic pterosaur, Skiphosoura bavarica gen. et sp. nov., preserved in three dimensions, that helps bridge the gap between current intermediate pterosaurs and the pterodactyloids. A new phylogeny shows that there is a general progression of key characteristics of increasing head size, increasing length of neck and wing metacarpal, modification to the fifth toe that supports the rear wing membrane, and gradual reduction in tail length and complexity from earlier pterosaurs into the first pterodactyloids. This also shows a clear evolution of the increasing terrestrial competence of derived pterosaurs. Furthermore, this closes gaps between the intermediates and their ancestors and descendants, and it firmly marks the rhamphorhynchines and ctenochasmatid clades as, respectively, being the closest earliest and latest groups to this succession of transitional forms.

Figure 1 Key elements of Skiphosoura

1. The anterior part of the skull with the premaxillary crest and large teeth. Also seen is the humerus. Scale bar, 100 mm.
2. The short caudal vertebrate with long zygapophyses and the elongate chevrons. Scale bar is 10 mm.

ca, caudal vertebra; cn, chevron; dr, dorsal rib; fe, femur; hu, humerus; pb, pubis; pm, premaxilla; wpx 1, wing phalanx 1. See also Figures S1, S2, S7, and S9

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Figure 2 Simplified phylogeny of Macronychoptera showing the phylogenetic placement of Skiphosoura bavarica gen. et sp. nov
The new taxon is recovered outside of Pterodactyloidea as a late-diverging member of a grade of non-pterodactyloid monofenestratans. Note that Monofenestrata also lies within an earlier-diverging grade of “rhamphorhynchids” (Dorygnathus to Angustinaripterus) and that “rhamphorhynchines” (Rhamphorhynchini, Dearc, Angustinaripterus) here represent the closest relatives of Monofenestrata. See also Figure S10 and Table S2.

Figure 3 The transition of pterosaur proportions across the transition from early pterosaurs to the pterodactyloids
Upper left: Nopsca curves of the proportions of major elements of the skeleton scaled against the length of the humerus showing the transition of major proportions. Center: simplified phylogeny showing the transition of key characters in the evolution of pterodactyloids from the rhamphorhynchines and “through” the early monofenestratans. Skeletals showing the transition with representational taxa: Rhamphorhynchus, Dearc, Darwinopterus, Skiphosoura, and Pterodactylus. This shows the transitions of multiple features across the tree: (1) the increasing length of the skull and increase of the size of the naris before fusion to form the NAOF, (2) increase in the length of the cervical series, (3) proportional reduction in the length of the wingfinger and increase in the length of the proximal wing, (4) increase in the length of the first wing phalanx to be the longest of the four phalanges, (5) increase in the length of the wing metacarpal, (6) increase in the size of the prepubes, (7) reduction of the fifth toe, and (8) reduction and simplification of the tail. Reconstructions modified from Unwin,¹⁵ Wellnhofer,¹⁶ and Witton.¹ These are not to scale but are all set to a uniform torso length.
See also Figures S1–S8 and S11 and Table S1.

Hone, David William Elliott; Fitch, Adam; Selzer, Stefan; Lauer, René; Lauer, Bruce
A new and large monofenestratan reveals the evolutionary transition to the pterodactyloid pterosaurs Current Biology (2024) Doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.023

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Inc. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

As Though to rub salt into creationist wounds, not only is this pterosaur from the Lower Tithonian (i.e. 148-150.8 million years old) but as the palaeontologist explain, it forms part of a transitional sequence of fossils showing how this group of reptiles evolved.