An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleolithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. This kind of wood was used for the Marathousa 1 digging stick. Use-wear analysis of stone tools at Marathousa 1 shows evidence of woodworking.
Credit: Original art by G. Prieto, copyright K. Harvati.
This is another of those pieces of evidence that should not exist if the Bible narrative were true — yet it does. The only honest conclusion is that the Bible narrative is false. It simply never happened. In scientific terms, this is falsification.
The evidence was published on 26 January 2026 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). It consists of two worked wooden objects discovered at Marathousa 1, in Greece’s central Peloponnese, by an international team led by researchers from the University of Reading, the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. The tools have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, making them the earliest known hand-held wooden tools and pushing back direct evidence for this kind of technology by at least 40,000 years.
That is awkward evidence for creationists, because the Bible is commonly interpreted by them as saying that humans were created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global flood that supposedly covered even the highest mountains. Such an event should either have obliterated fragile evidence of wooden tool use or buried it beneath a thick, worldwide layer of flood sediment containing the remains of the animals and plants destroyed in that catastrophe. And, of course, loose wooden tools submerged in a global flood would hardly be expected to remain neatly preserved in the archaeological context in which they were used.
Yet these wooden tools exist. They were recovered from secure Middle Pleistocene deposits, not from some chaotic jumble of flood debris. They are associated with stone tools, worked bone and butchered animal remains, including elephant, showing that Marathousa 1 was a lakeshore site used by early humans for a range of activities, including butchery and woodworking. In other words, the evidence is not floating around without context; it forms part of a coherent archaeological scene about 420,000 years older than the creationist date for the magical creation of Earth and everything on it.
One of the objects is a small alder trunk fragment with clear traces of shaping and use-wear, consistent with a multifunctional digging stick probably used at the edge of the ancient lake. The other is a much smaller worked piece of willow or poplar, possibly representing a previously unknown type of small Pleistocene wooden tool. A third piece of alder, initially investigated as a possible artefact, appears instead to have been marked by a large carnivore, possibly a bear — another indication that humans and carnivores were exploiting the same lakeshore environment.
The Marathousa 1 site lay in the Megalopolis Basin, a region that appears to have acted as a glacial refugium during a critical period in human evolution, when more complex behaviours and more diverse technologies were developing. The finds show early humans using not just stone, but wood and bone too — exactly what we should expect from intelligent, adaptable hominins making use of the materials around them, and exactly what is so rarely preserved because wood normally decays long before it can fossilise or survive archaeologically.
Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.
A paper published on 20 May 2026 in Science Advances by a team of palaeontologists led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, very neatly illustrates the difference between evolutionary biology and creationism. It reports the discovery of a rich new Ediacaran fossil site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories, containing fossils that appear earlier in the record, and in deeper-water settings, than current models of the Ediacaran biota had led palaeontologists to expect.
That is not a problem for evolution; it is how science progresses. Unexpected evidence does not destroy a scientific theory merely because it requires a refinement of detail. In this case, the discovery extends the known geographical, ecological and chronological range of part of the Ediacaran biota — the strange, mostly soft-bodied organisms that preceded, and helped set the stage for, the later Cambrian diversification of animal life.
When asked what would falsify the theory of evolution, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied, “a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian”. He was making the simple point that evolutionary theory predicts a broad historical sequence: mammals should not appear before vertebrates, vertebrates should not appear before animals, and rabbits should not appear hundreds of millions of years before their ancestors. A genuine rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be an anachronism so extreme that it would call the whole historical framework into question.
But that is not what palaeontologists have found here. The newly reported fossils are not out of sequence; they are exactly the kind of organisms that belong in late Precambrian rocks. The surprise is not that they are in the wrong part of life’s history, but that some of them appear a little earlier, in a wider geographical range, and in somewhat different environments than previously recognised. In other words, the anomaly is chronological and ecological, not evolutionary.
To a creationist, of course, the question of falsification has to be avoided, because the honest answer is deeply uncomfortable. The fossil record as a whole does not show a sudden magical creation of all living things a few thousand years ago. It shows succession: organisms appearing, diversifying, changing and disappearing through vast spans of geological time. The dating of the rocks, using multiple independent geological and radiometric methods, consistently points to an ancient Earth and a long history of life, not to a recent creation week followed by a global flood.
That is why every such discovery is awkward for creationism but routine for science. Fossils are not distributed randomly, as they would be if all life had been created at once and then jumbled together in a recent catastrophe. They occur in a recognisable sequence, constrained by stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, developmental biology and, for later organisms, genetics. The details are continually revised, but the broad pattern remains overwhelmingly consistent with evolution and wholly inconsistent with Biblical literalism.
By any honest application of the scientific method, that should be enough to falsify the creationist narrative beyond reasonable doubt. That it does not do so for creationists is not because the evidence is weak, but because the conclusion is protected from evidence. When the conclusion is sacred, facts become things to be explained away, misrepresented or ignored.
For evolutionary biologists, however, an unexpected fossil is not an embarrassment to be dismissed, but a clue to be investigated. If the evidence shows that part of the White Sea assemblage was present in Laurentia earlier than previously recognised, and in deeper-water environments, then the scientific response is to refine the model. The theory is not weakened by that process; it is strengthened, because it can absorb new evidence, generate better questions and produce a more accurate account of what happened.
The fossils described in this paper include more than 100 specimens, with several groups not previously recorded from North America, including Dickinsonia, Funisia, Kimberella and Eoandromeda. Some are estimated to be about 567 million years old, overlapping with the older Avalon assemblage and extending the known range of the White Sea assemblage by around 5–10 million years. The researchers also found that these organisms lived in deeper-water settings than had previously been recognised for this assemblage, supporting the idea that some early animal innovations may have begun offshore before spreading into shallower environments.
The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:
What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.
Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.
We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.
So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.
Parasites are hard enough for creationists to force-fit into their predetermined belief that all things were created by an omnibenevolent god, short of resorting to the near-blasphemous claim that 'Sin' somehow gave a rival creator unfettered access to their god's supposedly perfect creation in order to corrupt and destroy it. That rather undermines the claim of perfection in the first place, because a perfect creation, by definition, ought not to be corruptible.
But even harder for creationists to explain are parasites which, judged by their own favourite pseudo-scientific slogans — 'complex specified information' and 'irreducible complexity' — appear exquisitely adapted not merely to parasitise a living organism, but to consume it from within and then use its body as a platform for producing more parasites. In Pensoft's own popular description, these are "zombie" fungi: araneopathogenic fungi that parasitise spiders, mummify them, and then grow spore-producing structures from their bodies.
For example, newly identified spider-attacking fungi have recently been reported in two papers, published respectively in IMA Fungus and MycoKeys. Together, they add to the growing picture of a hidden diversity of highly specialised fungal parasites adapted to exploit spiders in different habitats.
The first is a new species of Purpureocillium fungus, belonging to the Purpureocillium atypicola group: Purpureocillium atlanticum. It was discovered in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, where it infects trapdoor spiders hidden in their burrows in the forest floor. The fungus covers the spider in cotton-white mycelium and eventually sends a purple fruiting structure up from the spider's cephalothorax, allowing spores to be released above the burrow. This discovery also shows that Purpureocillium atypicola, originally discovered in Japan in 1897 and thought to be a single species, is actually a global complex of multiple species.
The second paper reports three new species of Gibellula fungi — Gibellula pseudopigmentosa, Gibellula pseudosolita, and Gibellula sinensis — discovered on spiders in China and Laos. These fungi erupt from spider bodies in stalked, branch-like structures, and the species were distinguished from one another by differences in their reproductive structures, spore-forming bodies and phylogenetic relationships.
Only a creationist could believe the absurd notion that once literally nothing existed as a state of being, and that a god — presumably also made of nothing, because there was nothing to make it from — simultaneously existed and created everything out of that nothing by casting a magic spell, spoken in a language there was no-one else to communicate with in. The first intuitive mistake in that convoluted nonsense is the assumption that the default state of existence is non-existence.
Creationists, however, hypocritically try to hold science to a much higher standard than they apply to their own nonsensical superstitions. While demanding answers to what they imagine are "Gotcha!" questions of science, they routinely dismiss any answer with a wave of the hand. One favourite "Gotcha!" is: what was there before the Big Bang? The usual response is that, in the simplest version of standard cosmology, the question may be meaningless, because time and space themselves are part of the universe being described. If time does not extend through t = 0, then there is no "before" in the ordinary sense. But to a teleologically minded creationist, the answer that there was no "before" at the Big Bang sounds like a cop-out — a way of avoiding the question.
But what if there was a "before", not in the naive sense of empty time waiting around for a universe to be inserted into it, but in the deeper sense that what we call the Big Bang may have been a transition between two time-related phases of a larger physical system?
That this is at least a theoretical possibility comes from the work of three theoretical physicists, Enrique Gaztañaga and K. Sravan Kumar of the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, UK, and João Marto of the Departamento de Física, Centro de Matemática e Aplicações (CMA-UBI), Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal. They have revisited the work of Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, whose 1935 paper led to the idea of Einstein–Rosen bridges. These were later popularly interpreted as "wormholes" connecting different regions of spacetime, although that was not the original purpose of the idea.
Using a quantum-field-theoretic approach, Gaztañaga, Kumar and Marto argue that Einstein–Rosen bridges may not be space-travel tunnels at all, but mathematical bridges connecting two complementary components of a quantum state — two microscopic arrows of time. In one component, time flows in the direction we experience; in the other, it is mirrored in the opposite direction. Near black holes, or in expanding and collapsing universes, both components may be needed for a complete quantum description.
This offers a possible route through the black hole information paradox: the puzzle of how information can be preserved when matter crosses an event horizon and a black hole eventually evaporates. In the authors’ interpretation, information is not destroyed; it continues to evolve through the time-reversed, mirror component of the quantum state. That would preserve the quantum requirement that information is not simply lost, without requiring science-fiction wormholes, time machines or supernatural intervention.
The idea also opens the possibility that what we call the Big Bang was not an absolute beginning, but a bounce — a quantum transition from a preceding phase of cosmic evolution. In that scenario, our universe could even be the interior of a black hole formed in an earlier, parent cosmos, where collapse on one side becomes expansion on the other. The Big Bang, in other words, would not be a magical creation event, but a natural physical gateway.
That possibility also recalls an earlier speculative but serious scientific idea proposed by Lee Smolin in 1992, known as cosmological natural selection. Smolin suggested that black holes might give rise to new universes, with the physical constants of each descendant universe varying slightly from those of its parent. Universes whose laws favour the formation of many black holes would therefore tend to leave more descendant universes, rather as organisms that leave more offspring become over-represented in a biological population.
This is not evolution by genes, of course, and it is not established fact. It is a speculative cosmological hypothesis. But it is scientific speculation of the proper kind: naturalistic, mathematically framed, open to criticism and, in principle, vulnerable to observational evidence. It stands in stark contrast to creationism, which answers the same question with nothing more substantial than magic, asserted certainty and Bronze Age mythology.
One of the authors of the paper, Enrique Gaztanaga, also wrote an article in The Conversation, explaining their idea for a lay readership. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
According to Bronze Age Biblical mythology, existing species should have no ancestors because they were all supposedly magicked into existence fully formed during a few days of creation, just a few thousand years ago.
That childish belief has to be clung to by creationists despite the evidence of the real world, which tells a very different story: not of sudden manufacture, but of deep evolutionary history, extinction, replacement and survival. The iconic saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia provide a good example. They are not isolated products of a one-off act of creation, but living survivors of a much richer Australasian crocodylian history stretching back tens of millions of years, during which crocodile relatives occupied a variety of ecological niches, including those of formidable predators.
Modern Australia has only two native crocodile species: the freshwater crocodile, Crocodylus johnstoni, and the Indo-Pacific or saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus. But the fossil and archaeological evidence shows that these are merely the remnant survivors of a once more diverse crocodylian fauna, including the now-extinct mekosuchines, a distinctive Australasian group whose members included species very unlike the crocodiles familiar today.
Now a group of researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University, together with colleagues from several other institutions, has pieced together the fragmentary evidence from 26 fossil and archaeological sites across Australasia to build a clearer picture of the crocodylians that once lived in the region, and of their interactions with humans. Their review of the evidence was recently published, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
The study shows that the late Pleistocene record of Australian crocodylians is still incomplete and often difficult to date securely, but it nevertheless reveals a lost diversity. The extinct mekosuchines appear to have declined and disappeared on mainland Australia around the same broad period as other Australian megafauna, while some survived much later on south-west Pacific islands such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji. There, their remains occur in archaeological contexts, suggesting that they persisted until after human arrival and may have been affected by human activity.
Three of the authors have also written an article in The Conversation, explaining their research and its significance for understanding the evolutionary history of these reptiles. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Although they may have retained some residual function, what the forelimbs of Tyrannosaurus rex were almost certainly not used for was grabbing and holding large prey. They were far too short and mechanically limited for that role, especially in a predator whose real killing equipment was a massive skull, powerful jaws and bone-crushing bite. So, creationists need to explain why an intelligent designer would have equipped one of the most formidable predators ever to walk the Earth with such apparently inadequate little arms in the first place.
These apparent design failures are, of course, entirely understandable as the result of an evolutionary process operating over deep time. Just such an explanation has now been proposed by three researchers from University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge, who have published their findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It almost goes without saying that their explanation is an application of the Theory of Evolution, with no suggestion that the authors are about to abandon it in favour of creationism — as creationists have been confidently predicting for the best part of half a century, despite the singular lack of any peer-reviewed scientific movement in that direction.
The researchers found a strong association between the evolution of large, robust skulls and the reduction of forelimbs in several groups of non-avian theropod dinosaurs. In other words, the tiny arms of T. rex were not merely a side-effect of the whole body becoming larger. They were more closely linked to the evolution of powerful heads and jaws, suggesting a shift in hunting strategy in which the skull became the principal weapon and the forelimbs became less important.
The authors are careful to point out that correlation does not prove causation. But the pattern is consistent with an evolutionary arms race in which large predatory dinosaurs increasingly relied on massive skulls and crushing bites to tackle large prey, rather than on grasping forelimbs. As lead author Charlie Roger Scherer put it, trying to grab and hold a huge herbivorous dinosaur with claws would not have been ideal; attacking and holding with the jaws may have been far more effective.
For their study, the researchers developed a new way to quantify skull robustness, using factors such as how tightly the bones of the skull were connected, the compactness of the skull, and bite force. On this measure, T. rex scored highest, followed by Tyrannotitan, a large South American theropod that lived more than 30 million years earlier.
The study also showed that forelimb reduction evolved independently in at least five theropod groups: tyrannosaurids, abelisaurids, carcharodontosaurids, megalosaurids and ceratosaurids. That makes this a case of convergent evolution: different lineages arriving at a similar anatomical result because similar selective pressures favoured a similar functional solution.
The evolutionary sequence is straightforward in this case: as the prey became larger so the jaw and skull needed to become larger to kill and consume the prey. The mouth then became the primary means of gripping and killing the prey and the forelimbs, which are not needed for locomotion, became increasingly redundant but liable to injury, so there was an advantage in reducing their size. The fact that there was convergence in different lineages, is strongly suggestive that this mechanism evolved for the same reasons, multiple times.
The Evolution of the Tyrannosaurs.
Tyrannosaurus rex was not the starting point of the tyrannosaur story, but one of its final and most extreme products. The wider group, Tyrannosauroidea, had a long evolutionary history stretching back into the Middle Jurassic, more than 100 million years before T. rex. For much of that time, tyrannosauroids were not gigantic apex predators, but mostly small to medium-sized, lightly built theropods living alongside, and often in the shadow of, other large carnivorous dinosaurs.[1]
Early tyrannosauroids included animals such as Proceratosaurus from Jurassic Britain and Guanlong from Jurassic China. These were not simply miniature versions of T. rex. Some had crests, longer arms and more generalised predatory bodies. Their importance lies in showing that tyrannosaurs did not appear suddenly as fully formed, giant, short-armed killing machines. The famous late Cretaceous body plan was assembled gradually, piece by piece, over tens of millions of years.[1,2]
Several Early Cretaceous tyrannosauroids also show how different the early members of the group were from their later descendants. Dilong paradoxus, from China, was small and gracile, with relatively long arms and three-fingered hands. It also preserved evidence of filamentous protofeathers, showing that at least some early tyrannosauroids were not the purely scaly monsters of older popular reconstructions.[3]
The discovery of Yutyrannus huali, also from Early Cretaceous China, pushed that point further. This was a much larger tyrannosauroid, yet it too preserved long filamentous feathers. That does not prove that an adult T. rex was fully feathered, and skin impressions from later tyrannosaurids suggest at least some scaly areas. But it does show that feathers were part of the wider tyrannosauroid evolutionary background, not an irrelevant bird-like novelty.[4]
By the Late Cretaceous, especially in Asia and western North America, tyrannosaurids had become the dominant large predators. Genera such as Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus show the familiar trend towards massive skulls, powerful jaws, thick teeth, strong hind limbs, keen senses and reduced forelimbs. This was not a single act of design, but a long evolutionary sequence in which the skull and jaws increasingly took over the role of subduing prey.[1,5]
Recent work has added further detail to this picture. In 2025, researchers described Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, a Mongolian tyrannosauroid from the lower Upper Cretaceous, as a form close to the origin of Eutyrannosauria — the group that includes the large, late Cretaceous tyrannosaurs. Their analysis suggests a complex history of dispersal between Asia and North America, with tyrannosaur evolution involving migration, ecological opportunity and divergent growth patterns, rather than a simple straight-line progression from small ancestor to giant descendant.[6]
So the tiny arms of T. rex are not an isolated oddity needing to be excused as good design. They are part of a broader evolutionary pattern in which tyrannosaurs changed from relatively small, long-armed predators into large, skull-dominated apex predators. The result looks puzzling if imagined as the work of a designer starting from scratch, but it makes sense as the outcome of descent with modification, changing ecological pressures, and the evolutionary reworking of inherited anatomy.
The publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B is accompanied by a news release from UCL.
Why meat-eating dinosaurs like T. rex evolved tiny armsThe evolution of tiny arms in several groups of meat-eating dinosaurs was likely driven by the development of strong, powerful heads, which were used to attack prey, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL and Cambridge University.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at data for 82 species of theropod (two-legged, mainly meat-eating dinosaurs), finding that shortening of forelimbs occurred across five groups, including tyrannosaurids, the family that included Tyrannosaurus rex.
The team, including Dr Elizabeth Steell at Cambridge and Professor Paul Upchurch at UCL, found that smaller arms were closely linked to the development of large, powerful skulls and jaws, more so than to larger overall body size, indicating that tiny arms were not just a by-product of bodies getting bigger.
The researchers suggested that the increasing size of prey, in the form of gigantic sauropods (long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters) and other large herbivores, may have resulted in a shift to hunting using jaws and head instead of claws.
Everyone knows the T. rex had tiny arms but other giant theropod dinosaurs also evolved relatively small forelimbs. The Carnotaurus had ridiculously tiny arms, smaller than the T. rex. We sought to understand what was driving this change and found a strong relationship between short arms and large, powerfully built heads. The head took over from the arms as the method of attack. It’s a case of ‘use it or lose it’ – the arms are no longer useful and reduce in size over time. These adaptations often occurred in areas with gigantic prey. Trying to pull and grab at a 100ft-long sauropod with your claws is not ideal. Attacking and holding on with the jaws might have been more effective.
While our study identifies correlations and so cannot establish cause and effect, it is highly likely that strongly built skulls came before shorter forelimbs. It would not make evolutionary sense for it to occur the other way round, and for these predators to give up their attack mechanism without having a back-up.
Charlie Roger Scherer, lead author.
Department of Earth Sciences
University College London
London, UK.
For the study, researchers developed a new way to quantify skull robustness, based on factors including how tightly connected the bones of the head were, the dimensions of the skull (a more compact shape is stronger than an elongated shape), and bite force.
On this measure, the T. rex scored highest, followed by the Tyrannotitan, a theropod nearly as massive as T. rex who lived in what is now Argentina in the Early Cretaceous period (more than 30 million years earlier than T. rex).
The team said that increasingly gigantic prey may have resulted in an “evolutionary arms race”, where theropods developed strong skulls and jaws to better subdue this prey, and in many cases grew to gigantic sizes themselves.
Separately, the team compared forelimb length to skull length, classifying five groups of dinosaurs as having reduced forelimbs: tyrannosaurids, abelisaurids, carcharodontosaurids (including the Tyrannotitan), megalosaurids and ceratosaurids.
They found reduced forelimbs had a stronger link with skull robustness than with skull size or overall body size. The secondary importance of overall body size was illustrated by the fact that some theropods with strongly built heads and tiny arms were not very large, the researchers said, citing the Majungasaurus, an apex predator in Madagascar 70 million years ago, but weighing a mere 1.6 tonnes, about a fifth of the T. rex.
The researchers noted that the forelimbs appeared to reduce in size in different ways, with hands and the lower part of the arm (past the elbow) shortening the most in abelisaurids (with late abelisaurids such as the Majungasaurus having exceptionally tiny hands). In tyrannosaurids, on the other hand, each element of the forelimb was reduced at a similar rate.
The team concluded that the same outcome (tiny forelimbs) was likely achieved through potentially different developmental pathways in different species.
A team of five academics work on different aspects of dinosaur evolution at UCL, with strong collaborative links to the Natural History Museum. The extended research group comprises four research fellows and postdoc researchers, and more than 10 PhD students. At least four of the PhD students are working on dinosaur evolution, with the others looking at a wider array of other evolutionary questions relating to vertebrates, including crocodiles and birds.
Abstract
Forelimb reduction has been observed in numerous and disparate non-avian theropod dinosaurs, resulting in the hypothesis that reduced forelimbs evolved convergently. Clades with reduced forelimbs also possess high degrees of cranial robusticity and gigantic body sizes. Here, we provide a novel quantification of forelimb reduction across Theropoda, and create and implement a cranial robusticity scoring system, and analyse this dataset using bivariate and comparative phylogenetic analyses. Results indicate that forelimb reduction is strongly correlated with cranial robusticity and gigantism. Reduced/vestigial forelimbs evolved in at least five theropod lineages in concert with increased cranial robusticity and gigantism. Abelisaurids, carcharodontosaurids and tyrannosaurids show the greatest forelimb reduction relative to the skull. Repeated forelimb reduction across theropods was facilitated by increased cranial robusticity and greater body size that was potentially influenced by an upward trend in prey body size. These events resulted in a shift from subduing prey using grasping forelimbs to using powerful bites and robust skulls.
So the famously tiny arms of Tyrannosaurus rex are not an embarrassment for evolutionary biology; they are exactly the sort of thing evolution explains. They are the result of history, contingency and trade-offs: inherited anatomy being modified over time as natural selection favoured a different way of killing prey. As the skull became larger, stronger and more effective as the main predatory weapon, the forelimbs became less important, and so there was no evolutionary pressure to maintain them as large, powerful grasping organs.
That is why this feature is so difficult to explain as the work of an intelligent designer. A designer starting from scratch could simply have produced an animal with both a massive, bone-crushing skull and proportionately useful forelimbs, or dispensed with the arms altogether. Instead, what we see is the familiar evolutionary pattern: not perfect engineering, but modified inheritance; not clean-sheet design, but anatomical compromise shaped by changing selection pressures.
Creationism has no scientific explanation for this. It can only wave the problem away by declaring, without evidence, that the tiny arms must have had some unknown purpose, or that the designer’s motives are beyond human understanding. But that is not an explanation; it is an excuse for not having one. It predicts nothing, explains nothing, and adds nothing to our understanding of tyrannosaur biology.
The Theory of Evolution, by contrast, not only explains why such apparently odd features exist, but also provides a framework in which they can be tested. The prediction is that similar ecological and functional pressures should produce similar anatomical trends in separate lineages — and that is exactly what this study found. Forelimb reduction evolved independently in several theropod groups, associated not with divine whim, but with the repeated evolution of large, robust skulls and powerful jaws.
In other words, the tiny arms of T. rex are not a mystery for science; they are evidence of evolution doing what evolution does — adapting existing structures to changing circumstances, often imperfectly, always historically, and never with the foresight or tidiness that intelligent design would require. Once again, the evidence fits the evolutionary model and leaves creationism with nothing more substantial than incredulity, special pleading and the hope that no one looks too closely.
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Another day, another dinosaur. At least, that must be how it feels to creationists trying to cling to demonstrably false beliefs by ignoring the evidence and pretending each new discovery is either a mistake, a fraud, or a sinister attempt by scientists to undermine their faith.
This time the problem comes from Teruel, Spain, where palaeontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis have described an exceptionally well-preserved partial skull of a stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Villar del Arzobispo Formation, dating to about 150 million years ago. Their results, published in May 2025 in the Pensoft journal Vertebrate Zoology, identify the fossil as belonging to Dacentrurus armatus, and as the most complete stegosaurian skull yet found in Europe.
That matters because stegosaurian skulls are notoriously rare. Their bones were fragile, and the animals’ skulls were small compared with their heavily built bodies, so cranial material is much less commonly preserved than vertebrae, limb bones, plates or tail spikes. A skull as complete as this one is therefore not just another fossil for a museum drawer, but a valuable piece of anatomical evidence for understanding how these plated, quadrupedal herbivores evolved.
Using this specimen, the researchers were able to refine the known anatomy of Dacentrurus armatus and reassess the evolutionary relationships of stegosaurs more generally. Their analysis supports the division of Stegosauria into two major clades, Huayangosauridae and Stegosauridae, and they formalise a further grouping, Neostegosauria, to include later-diverging stegosaurids. In other words, one skull from Spain helps clarify not only a single European dinosaur species, but the wider evolutionary history and geographical spread of the iconic plated dinosaurs.
If nothing else, work such as this illustrates how science treats a new discovery: not as a threat to be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with dogma, but as additional evidence to be tested against existing knowledge. Where necessary, classifications are revised, hypotheses are adjusted, and understanding moves a little closer to reality.
Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and then tries to make the evidence fit. Science starts with the evidence and changes the conclusion when the evidence demands it. That is why a 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull from Spain is a contribution to human knowledge, not a theological inconvenience to be waved away.
To a conspiracy-theorist creationist who sees science as an organised plot to trick them into changing their mind, it must seem that the whole world and its dog are ganging up on them. The “conspiracy” has now spread to a team of researchers led by Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, Japan, who have announced the discovery of fossilised jaws of giant octopuses that may have been apex predators in Late Cretaceous seas, about 100 million years before creationism’s mythical “Creation Week”. Some of these animals may have reached nearly 20 metres in length, making them among the largest invertebrates yet described.
To a creationist, apparently, it is more plausible to believe that a god self-assembled out of nothing, then made an entire universe out of nothing by magic just a few thousand years ago, than to accept that Earth and life on it are the result of long, slow, scientifically demonstrable natural processes. So, when the evidence says otherwise, the evidence must somehow be forged, misrepresented or misunderstood. Besides, Bronze Age people who thought the world was flat, with a solid dome over it, said so — and what better evidence could there be than that?
What the team of researchers from several Japanese research institutions, together with Jörg Mutterlose of Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, discovered was recently published in Science. Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence model, they identified fossil jaws hidden inside rock samples from the Late Cretaceous period. The fossils, from Japan and Vancouver Island, date from between about 100 and 72 million years ago. They had been preserved in calm seafloor sediments, retaining fine details, including wear marks that reveal how these animals fed.
Based on the size and shape of the jaws, the researchers estimate that some of these extinct finned octopuses, especially Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, may have reached nearly 20 metres in total length. Their jaws show heavy chipping, scratching, cracking and polishing, consistent with repeated forceful biting into hard prey such as shells, bones or other resistant material. These were not passive, soft-bodied animals drifting harmlessly through the Cretaceous seas; they appear to have been powerful, active predators, competing in ecosystems otherwise assumed to have been dominated by large marine reptiles and sharks.
One especially intriguing finding was asymmetrical wear on the jaws. In two species, one side of the biting surface was more heavily worn than the other, suggesting that these animals may have favoured one side when handling difficult prey. This sort of behavioural lateralisation is associated in modern animals with complex neural processing, raising the possibility that advanced predatory behaviour, and perhaps a degree of intelligence, had already evolved in these early octopus relatives. The discovery also pushes the fossil record of finned octopuses back by about 15 million years, and the broader octopus record by about 5 million years.
I wrote recently about how and why dinosaurs are such a problem for creationists, which is why some of them resort to the desperate and ludicrously implausible claim that non-avian dinosaurs were contemporaneous with modern humans.
Their problem has now become a little worse with the announcement, in a paper in Scientific Reports, of the discovery of a new species of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur from Thailand. The study was led by palaeontologists from University College London (UCL), Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand. The dinosaur has been named Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis and is described as the largest dinosaur yet found in Southeast Asia. Its fossilised bones were discovered about ten years ago at the edge of a communal pond in Chaiyaphum Province, north-eastern Thailand.
The scale of the animal is impressive. One of its front leg bones, the right humerus, was 1.78 metres long — about the height of an adult human. From the preserved spine, ribs, pelvis and limb bones, the researchers estimate that Nagatitan was about 27 metres long and weighed around 27 tonnes, roughly the same as nine adult Asian elephants.
Nagatitan was a sauropod — one of the long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaurs that included animals such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. More specifically, it was a somphospondylan titanosauriform, belonging to Euhelopodidae, a clade of sauropods so far known only from Asia. It lived during the Early Cretaceous, about 100–120 million years ago, in what was then a semi-arid landscape crossed by meandering rivers and inhabited by fish, freshwater sharks, crocodile-like reptiles, pterosaurs, smaller herbivorous dinosaurs and large theropod predators.
An open-access paper published in January 2025 in the journal Analytical Chemistry will no doubt have had creationist disinformation merchants rubbing their hands with glee, because it is exactly the sort of finding they can misrepresent to their scientifically illiterate followers as 'proof' that dinosaurs lived only a few thousand years ago, provided they first wrap it in the usual recycled falsehoods about geological dating methods.
The paper, by a team led by Professor Stephen Taylor of the University of Liverpool, with colleagues from the university’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, the Materials Innovation Factory, and the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports strong evidence for preserved collagen remnants in a 66-million-year-old dinosaur fossil. The fossil in question is a 22 kg sacrum from Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed hadrosaur, excavated from Upper Cretaceous strata of the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota.
Of course, what creationists will not be telling their followers is that this was not a case of fresh dinosaur meat, intact soft tissue, or anything remotely resembling a recently dead animal. The researchers used several independent analytical techniques. Cross-polarised light microscopy showed a pattern of birefringence consistent with collagen; tandem liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry identified and quantified hydroxyproline, an amino acid strongly associated with collagen in bone; and bottom-up proteomics detected collagen peptide sequences. In other words, the finding is evidence of degraded collagen remnants preserved within an exceptionally well-preserved fossil, not evidence that the fossil is young.
To a creationist disinformation merchant, the question will be: how can we exploit the intuitive but mistaken assumption that all proteins must decay within a few years, so that the presence of collagen remnants can be sold as 'proof' that this dinosaur died recently? To a scientist, the question is very different: since the fossil comes from rocks known from independent geological evidence to be around 66 million years old, what happened during fossilisation to allow traces of original organic molecules to persist for so long?
That contrast could hardly be clearer. Creationism begins with its conclusion and then tries to force every inconvenient fact into it. Science begins with the evidence and asks what the evidence implies. Creationists ask how the facts can be made to protect a predetermined dogma; scientists ask what has to be revised, refined, or investigated further in the light of new evidence.
The real scientific importance of this discovery is not that it challenges the age of the fossil, but that it opens up new possibilities for studying ancient life. If remnants of collagen can survive under particular fossilisation conditions, then other exceptionally preserved fossils may also retain molecular traces that can help clarify relationships between extinct animals, reveal more about dinosaur biology, and improve our understanding of how organic molecules can persist over geological time.
Creationism seeks to close down enquiry by pretending that all the answers were written down by Bronze Age storytellers. Science does the opposite: it asks better questions, develops better techniques, and adds to the sum total of human knowledge.
