Refuting Creationism - How Evolution Explains The Nightjar's Wing - No Magic Needed

European nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus

The nightjar needs to be able to fly both long distances and at lower speeds.

Photo: Urban Rundström.

Nightjar wings reveal a trade-off between hunting slowly and travelling far | Lund University

Evolution does not produce organisms that are perfect at everything. Natural selection acts on inherited variation, and an improvement in one function can come at a cost to another. A bird that must both migrate over long distances and catch insects in slow, manoeuvrable flight faces competing aerodynamic demands. The European nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus, provides a revealing example of how these demands can produce a workable compromise.

As described in a news release from Lund University, the nightjar travels between Europe and southern Africa, yet uses the same wings to pursue flying insects at low speeds. Efficient travelling and slow-speed hunting do not necessarily favour identical wing shapes. Features that help the bird remain airborne while moving slowly can impose an aerodynamic penalty when it flies faster.

The research, published in PLOS Biology, investigated this compromise by measuring the airflow behind nightjars flying in a wind tunnel. At cruising speeds, the researchers detected an unusual double wingtip vortex associated with less efficient lift generation. They interpret this as a cost of the bird’s broad, slotted wingtips: a shape likely to help generate lift during slow flight and hovering, but which produces a less favourable distribution of lift at higher speeds.

Creationism Refuted - Humans Were Leaving Footprints In Lakeside Mud 11,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist's rendition of the landscape at White Sands during the last Ice Age.

Karen Carr

Fig. 2. Ancient human footprints and other ichnological features.

(A) A large canid track superimposed on a human footprint excavated on TH3. Photo Credit: K.B.S., US Geological Survey (USGS). (B) Linear features (LF) on TH2 that have been interpreted as travois pulled by humans, presumably during transport of resources (2). Photo Credit: K.B.S., USGS. (C) Orthomosaic of the surface of TP15 showing human footprints (Photo Credit: M.R.B., Bournemouth University). (D) Color rendered height map of multiple human footprints on TH0. (E) Color rendered height map of human footprints on TH(−3).

From: Kathleen B. Springer et al.(2026).

Footprints in the (white) sand: Humans experienced abrupt environmental shifts during the last ice age | University of Arizona News

More than 20,000 years before the present, people were walking along a lakeshore in what is now New Mexico, leaving footprints that would eventually become a serious inconvenience for biblical literalists. At White Sands National Park, those tracks preserve evidence of human lives during the Last Glacial Maximum — long before the supposed creation of the Universe in the chronology favoured by young-Earth creationists, let alone their alleged global flood and subsequent repopulation of the Americas.

Now, research published open access in Science Advances reaffirms that the footprints date to approximately 23,500–21,700 years ago. It also reconstructs a changing landscape: retreating Lake Otero, shifts from conifer forest towards steppe vegetation, and episodes of severe aridity. Some changes occurred within a human lifetime. These were people inhabiting a dynamic Ice Age environment, leaving their tracks alongside those of mammoths, giant sloths and dire wolves.

The history of the dating is itself an instructive example of how science works. The original age estimates, announced in 2021, attracted criticism because they relied on seeds from aquatic plants. Such plants can absorb dissolved ancient carbon, potentially making radiocarbon dates appear older than they really are. That was a legitimate methodological objection, and the appropriate response was to test it. A follow-up study reported in 2023 used pollen from terrestrial conifers and an independent technique that measures when mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight. Both supported the ancient chronology.

Creationism Refuted - Dinosaur Tracks Record Transition From Crawling to Bipedalism

Holotype of Pachychirotherium gardenaensis

Photo: @ University La Sapienza of Roma.

From Sprawling to Bipedalism: How Locomotion Evolved in Dinosaur Ancestors - Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

One of the familiar refrains of creationism is that the fossil record contains no transitional forms. Yet transitions need not be preserved only in bones: sometimes, animals left evidence of evolutionary change in the footprints they made. A new study of ancient reptile tracks reveals a stepwise acquisition of features associated with upright locomotion — changes that helped establish the conditions for the later evolution of two-legged movement in dinosaurs and their close relatives.

The research, by Lorenzo Marchetti of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Hendrik Klein of the Saurierwelt Paläontologisches Museum, is published in Palaeontology, concerns early archosauriforms, members of the wider evolutionary group that includes archosaurs — dinosaurs, pterosaurs, crocodilians and their relatives. Their history extends back into the Late Permian, more than 250 million years ago: already an insurmountable chronological problem for a literal reading of Genesis.

Marchetti and Klein re-examined footprints from the Val Gardena Sandstone Formation of northern Italy, including previously undescribed specimens, and recognised a distinctive track type, which they named Pachychirotherium gardenaensis. This is a name for the fossil traces, rather than a newly identified species of skeletal animal. Comparisons with fossil feet suggest that their makers were early archosauriforms with an anatomy resembling that of erythrosuchids.

The wider comparison with Permian and Triassic tracks is particularly revealing. Late Permian forms retain evidence consistent with sprawling locomotion; some Early Triassic forms show transitional characteristics; and a fully erect stance probably emerged during the Middle Triassic. Increasing reliance on the toes, changes in toe proportions and a reduction in the relative size of the forefoot impressions accompanied this evolutionary transition. These features were assembled progressively, rather than appearing together as a completed package.

Refuting Creationism - Kyushu, Japan Was Devastated By A Volcano 73,000 Years Ago - But There Is No Trace Of Noah's Global Flood

Mount Iō, Iōjima, Japan, on the edge of the Kikai caldera

By 名古屋太郎 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Kikai caldera (dotted outline) is mostly below sea level. Iōjima in on its northern rim.

By Batholith - Topographic data: NASA's SRTM-1 30m Mesh (ver.3 2014) Rendering software: KASHMIR 3D, Public Domain, Link

How one of Earth’s worst volcanic disasters affected societies | Lund University

A real catastrophe leaves evidence. In prehistoric Japan, an enormous volcanic eruption left a recognisable layer of ash, devastated ecosystems and disrupted human communities. Thousands of years later, archaeologists can still investigate its consequences. Yet the supposedly global catastrophe described in Genesis — a flood intended to destroy almost all terrestrial life — finds no corresponding place in Japan’s long archaeological history. The contrast could hardly be more awkward for biblical literalism.

The real disaster was the Kikai-Akahoya eruption, which occurred about 7,300 years ago, approximately 5300 BCE. That places it roughly three millennia before the Flood date of 2348 BCE in Archbishop Ussher’s chronology, and even before his supposed creation of the world in 4004 BCE. Japan was already inhabited by Jōmon communities who obtained their food through hunting, fishing and gathering. These were real people living in established societies, confronting a natural disaster in a world that, according to that biblical timetable, did not yet exist.
Now, an international team has investigated how those communities responded. Their findings, published in Science Advances reveal a more complicated history than either universal collapse or undisturbed survival. Southern Kyushu was already experiencing population decline before the eruption, whereas population growth in northern Kyushu continued through the disaster and its aftermath. Some more distant regions experienced stagnation or decline.

How can researchers reconstruct population changes without written records or a prehistoric census? They used radiocarbon dates from archaeological remains as an indirect measure of human activity, analysing their distribution through time and across the landscape with Bayesian statistical models. The underlying principle is that larger populations generally leave more traces of occupation that can subsequently be recovered and dated. Such evidence provides estimates of demographic trends rather than exact headcounts, and its interpretation must allow for dating uncertainty and the limitations of the archaeological record.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another of Those 'Non-Existent' Transitional Fossils - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Image by Chung-Tat Cheung

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Image by Chung-Tat Cheung

Not All Early Birds Evolved Toward Better Flight, Jurassic Fossil Suggests----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Creationists who insist that there are no transitional fossils might wish that palaeontologists would stop finding animals that refuse to respect their imaginary boundaries. A newly described Jurassic bird from China is another such inconvenience: an evolutionary mosaic combining bird-like features with conspicuously dinosaurian anatomy. And, to compound the difficulty for Bible literalists, it lived approximately 150 million years ago — long before their supposed ‘Creation Week’.

The animal, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, discovered in the Late Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna of Fujian Province, is described in a paper published in Nature. This crow-sized animal possessed bird-like pelvic and hindlimb features alongside serrated teeth and a hyperextensible second toe bearing a sickle-shaped claw — a combination reminiscent of its close dinosaurian relatives.

Its unusually short forelimbs provide another intriguing part of the story. Analyses of its limb proportions strongly support a terrestrial, flightless lifestyle, despite its placement within Avialae, the evolutionary group containing living birds and their closest extinct relatives. The researchers interpret it as evidence of exceptionally early flight loss. That interpretation necessarily involves reconstructing ancestral capabilities: the fossil provides anatomical evidence about how this animal lived, rather than a direct record of either its behaviour or its ancestors’ flight.

This matters because evolution has no destination. Early birds were not obliged to become progressively better flying machines, any more than every mammalian lineage was obliged to become a bat. Natural selection favours traits according to their consequences in particular environments; it does not work towards a predetermined ideal. A lineage exploiting opportunities on the ground could follow a different evolutionary course from one increasingly dependent on flight.

Creationism Refuted - How Cephalopods Evolved Intelligence - No Magic Needed

Cephalopods

Californian two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides). Embryo at the final stage before hatching. The species is named after the two prominent blue eyespots that can help deter predators.

3D structure of DNA may explain how cephalopods evolved complex brains

How much new DNA does evolution need to produce a new biological capability? Intelligent design creationists commonly assume that new functions require new “complex specified information”, then insist that only an intelligent designer can supply it. But this overlooks something fundamental about genomes: what matters is not simply which genes an organism possesses, but how, where and when those genes are used. Rearranging existing components can change what a biological system does, without requiring every component to be invented afresh, and, importantly, no new DNA being inserted into the genome.

A new study published in Nature Communications explores this possibility in coleoid cephalopods — octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. These animals have elaborate nervous systems and remarkable behavioural capabilities. The research suggests that part of the explanation for their evolutionary innovations may lie in the three-dimensional organisation of their genomes.

DNA does not lie inside a cell as a neatly stretched-out sequence. It folds, bringing regions that are distant along a chromosome into physical proximity. Those contacts can influence gene regulation. An ancient episode of extensive genome rearrangement in the ancestors of coleoids created opportunities for previously separated regions to acquire new regulatory relationships. The researchers describe the resulting interdependence as “regulatory entanglement”.

Comparing genome organisation and gene activity across species, tissues and developmental stages, the team found a combination of stability and flexibility: larger chromatin domains were broadly conserved, while hundreds of smaller DNA loops varied with species and biological context. Their experiments also went beyond comparisons: deleting a candidate regulatory sequence using CRISPR–Cas9 demonstrated a role for these long-range interactions in neural development.

This is not proof that genome rearrangement alone produced cephalopod intelligence, nor does it mean that no new DNA evolved. The study also considers genome expansion. Its importance is more interesting than either oversimplification: evolutionary novelty can involve changes in the relationships between genetic components, as well as changes to the components themselves.

That leaves the intelligent design argument with a familiar problem. Calling a biological outcome “information” does not demonstrate that it required a supernatural author. Here, scientists are investigating physical mechanisms through which genome evolution can generate new regulatory possibilities. Whether creationists choose to call those possibilities “new information” changes neither the mechanisms nor the evidence. The scientific question is how complexity evolved — and this research offers another testable part of the answer.

Creationism Refuted - How Archaeopteryx Was Able To Fly - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Archaeopteryx soaring about dinosaurs

ChatGPT-6 Astra

An illustration of Archaeopteryx

Mark Witton.

How the ‘first bird’ leapt into the sky and soared above the dinosaurs

About 150 million years ago, a small, feathered dinosaur was negotiating one of the most consequential transitions in vertebrate evolution: getting airborne and remaining there under its own power. Archaeopteryx, with its feathered wings, toothed jaws, clawed fingers and long, bony tail, combined features that creationists prefer to imagine belong in separate, independently created categories. It also lived almost 150 million years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Both its anatomy and its antiquity present awkward problems for anyone trying to compress the history of life into a literal reading of Genesis.

Now, a paper in Developmental Biology, by Erik A. Meilak and colleagues, addresses a particularly interesting question: how could an animal with a less specialised flight apparatus than that of modern birds get off the ground? Their modelling suggests that powerful hindlimbs could have supplied the answer. A succession of forward leaps, potentially assisted by a wingbeat between jumps, could have built up sufficient speed for flapping flight.

For a modelled Archaeopteryx weighing about 400 grams, the researchers calculated that three leaps using both legs, or two with an intervening downward wingbeat, could have brought it to a sustainable flight speed of approximately seven metres per second. This provides a plausible route into the air without requiring the powerful, explosive take-off of many living birds. It is a proposed biomechanical solution, rather than direct evidence of an observed Jurassic behaviour, but it makes a specific evolutionary possibility testable.

That distinction matters because evolution does not require a modern bird’s entire flight apparatus to appear in one miraculous event. Existing structures can acquire additional functions, and useful intermediate combinations can precede the more specialised arrangements found in descendants. Legs already capable of propelling an animal across the ground could also launch it into the air; feathered forelimbs could contribute to that movement before acquiring all the refinements of modern wings. No foresight is required, only advantages available to the animal at the time.

Nor does describing Archaeopteryx as transitional mean it was an unfinished creature waiting for evolution to complete it. It was an animal in its own right, with a revealing combination of ancestral and derived features. Birds are themselves theropod dinosaurs, so the transition concerns the emergence of avian specialisations within the dinosaur lineage, not a magical crossing between unrelated ‘kinds’. Calling Archaeopteryx “just a bird” does nothing to explain away its dinosaurian anatomy or its position in evolutionary history.

The study does not settle every question about the origin of flight, and it need not do so to expose the weakness of the creationist alternative. Science can investigate how a transitional animal functioned, compare competing explanations and refine its conclusions. A literal Genesis chronology cannot even accommodate the time in which that animal lived. In the following article, reproduced from The Conversation, co-author Neil J. Gostling explains how the research brings us closer to understanding the steps — or, in this case, leaps — by which early birds took to the air. His article is reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Another New Dinosaur From The Isle of Wight For Creationists To Ignore

AI-generated impression of Invictibellatrix amberina in its natural habitat.

ChapGPT-6 Astra (based on a reconstruction
by Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas).

An artist’s illustration of the new theropod dinosaur, Invictibellatrix amberina (centre of the image), in its ecosystem on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom in the Early Cretaceous (around 120 million years ago). It lived in what was likely a seasonally wet-to-dry floodplain environment and is surrounded by other dinosaurs including large long-necked rebbachisaurid sauropods (directly behind Invictibellatrix, centre) and relatives of Iguanodon (right). A spinosaurid theropod, potentially the apex predator of the time, fishes (left). Invictibellatrix has just caught and is consuming two small mammals. Gymnosperms dominate the environment as flowering plants (angiosperms) were not common at this time. Other reptiles including relatives to modern lizards, crocodiles and turtles enjoy the warm Early Cretaceous weather of the UK.

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas.

UK dinosaur fossil identified as new long-clawed predator | UCL News

Palaeontologists do not need to set out to refute biblical creationism. They merely need to investigate the history of life, and the evidence does the job for them. Another example comes from the Isle of Wight, where a fossil has revealed a previously unrecognised predatory dinosaur that lived about 120 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of a literal reading of Genesis. While creationists struggle to squeeze the history of an entire planet into a few thousand years, researchers are reconstructing the evolutionary relationships and geographical movements of animals separated from us by immense stretches of geological time.

The fundamental problem creationists have created for themselves is that, because there is vastly more history pre-'Creation Week' than there is post-'Creation Week', by several orders of magnitude, virtually every palaeontological, geological and archaeological discovery incidentally refutes creationism, so the most risible and dishonest mental gymnastics have to be invoked to dismiss it all, and creationists end up looking both intellectually and morally bankrupt.

For example, as described in a study, published in Royal Society Open Science, a team led by University College London (UCL) researchers has identified Invictibellatrix amberina, the first recognised European member of a group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as megaraptorans. The discovery concerns a partial skull acquired by the Natural History Museum in 1924. CT scanning and anatomical comparisons have now revealed its significance. From its relatives, the researchers infer an animal around three to four metres long, probably feathered and equipped with substantial grasping arms and curved claws.

The discovery also helps fill a geographical gap in the group’s known distribution, supporting the hypothesis that megaraptorans dispersed from Asia through Europe towards the southern continents. This is the sort of question evolutionary science can investigate: how related animals diversified, where they lived, and how changing geography influenced their distribution. A fossil becomes evidence within a wider, testable account of life’s history.

How Science Works - And Why Religions Don't

Galaxy cluster XLSSC 122

JWST

New JWST images of abnormally well-developed galaxy cluster open up the “cosmic noon” frontier | IPAC

This two-panel image shows a distant galaxy cluster as it has been observed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). At over 10 billion light-years away, the cluster XLSSC 122 is the most distant known example of a cluster found to act as a strong gravitational lens, magnifying and distorting images of yet more distant galaxies behind it.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA; Kyle Finner (Caltech/IPAC)
Image processing: Robert Hurt (Caltech/IPAC-SELab)

Young-Earth creationism, with its insistence on the literal, inerrant truth of Genesis, is a prisoner of its own conclusions. Evidence may be disputed, dismissed or reinterpreted, but the sacred account must remain beyond correction. Science proceeds on a fundamentally different basis: even its most successful explanations must remain open to revision when observations expose their limitations. Where creationism demands that reality conform to an ancient text, science requires its explanations to conform to reality.

A striking example comes from new James Webb Space Telescope observations of the distant galaxy cluster XLSSC 122. First identified in an X-ray survey in 2014, this cluster is now seen in extraordinary detail, revealing an unexpectedly high concentration of mass in its core. The problem is not that gravity should have been incapable of binding galaxies together, but that such a concentrated structure appears to have developed earlier than standard models would lead astronomers to expect.

JWST revealed arcs of light from more distant galaxies, distorted by the cluster’s gravity. This phenomenon, known as strong gravitational lensing, allows astronomers to investigate how mass, including invisible dark matter, is distributed within the cluster. The resulting measurements suggest that massive cosmic structures may sometimes assemble more rapidly than current models predict.

Refuting Creationism - A Newly-Discovered Giant Fungus from A Family That Evolved 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Stromata of Dianjunus rex in the field. (a, c, d, f) Stromata attached to host roots. (b, e, g, h) Stromata around host plant. (a) Collectors. (i) Total weight of largest bilobedstromata.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Stromata of Dianjunus rex attached to host root.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Scientists discover ‘D-rex’, a giant fungus from Chinese forests whose unique lineage dates back 65 million years | EurekAlert!

Another newly described species has brought with it an evolutionary history that refuses to fit into creationism’s abbreviated chronology. This time it is a giant fungus from China’s Yunnan Province, named Dianjunus rex, whose family lineage is estimated to have diverged about 65 million years ago — almost 65 million years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Apparently, this fungus’s ancestors failed to wait for the universe to be created.

Described in a new paper in Frontiers in Fungal Biology, the fungus produces imposing reproductive structures reaching 50 centimetres high and weighing up to 2.2 kilograms. Its anatomy and genetic relationships justified the recognition of not merely a new species and genus, but a new family: Dianjunaceae.

The date needs a little care. The researchers are not claiming that today’s species has remained unchanged for 65 million years. Their evolutionary analysis estimates when its family lineage separated from its closest relatives, with a reported range of approximately 50–80 million years. That uncertainty is scientifically significant, but offers no refuge for biblical literalism: even the youngest end of the range is vastly older than the entire history permitted by a young-Earth reading of Genesis.

There is a further irony here. Genesis offers no recognition of fungi as a distinct group of organisms. Although biblical passages refer to conditions translated as mould or mildew, these are hardly an account of fungal biology or evolutionary relationships. We cannot know that the authors simply assumed mushrooms were plants, but we can say that their creation narrative supplies none of the distinctions needed to understand this discovery. That is unsurprising in an ancient religious text; it becomes a problem only when that text is presented as authoritative natural history.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste of Spawning Coral

Spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef - prolific waste in action

Spawning coral release quintillions of eggs each year: new research

spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

One of the most conspicuous features of the living world is its reproductive extravagance. Organisms manufacture enormous quantities of eggs, sperm, seeds and spores, only for the overwhelming majority to leave no descendants. Coral spawning provides a spectacular example: an underwater blizzard of reproductive material, produced at considerable biological expense, from which only a tiny fraction will ultimately contribute to the next generation of breeding corals. If this is intelligent design, its designer appears remarkably comfortable with failure on an industrial scale.

New research by M. M. Bilodeau and K. M. Quigley, published in Ecology and Evolution puts a staggering figure on this reproductive output. The researchers estimate that Indo-Pacific corals could produce approximately 3.46 quintillion eggs — 3.46 × 10¹⁸ — during a single hypothetical spawning period. This is a first approximation based on reproductive traits and coral cover, with missing measurements estimated from other traits. It is neither a direct count nor a precise total for all coral reproduction worldwide each year.

Each egg and sperm normally carries one set of chromosomes: half the usual chromosome complement of the parent’s body cells, including a reshuffled selection of its inherited genetic variants. Producing these cells requires resources, and eggs also contain provisions for early development. Yet many gametes never achieve fertilisation, while many resulting larvae fail to establish themselves and survive to reproductive maturity. The study estimates the scale of egg production, not the precise proportion lost, but the distinction between producing eggs and producing successful descendants is fundamental.

Creationism In Crisis - A Jurassic Crocodile With Needle Teeth - 170 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of Ctenosuchus tenuidens hunting.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

An artist’s restoration of Ctenosuchus tenuidens.

Artwork by Nathan Dehaut.

New species of Jurassic crocodile had unusually slender teeth | University of Portsmouth

Some 170 million years ago, in the rivers and lakes of what is now Morocco, a crocodile relative was exploiting a feeding niche very different from that of the large-prey predators familiar today. Named Ctenosuchus tenuidens, it had a long, narrow snout armed with exceptionally slender, closely spaced teeth. For young-Earth creationists, its existence presents the familiar chronological problem: an animal was living, feeding and participating in a complex ecosystem more than 169 million years before their preferred biblical chronology allows Earth itself to have existed.

The discovery is described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Hamzah Imran of the School of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Portsmouth, and colleagues. The animal belonged to the thalattosuchians, an extinct group of crocodile relatives. Its delicate dentition suggests a diet of small aquatic prey, such as tiny fish, shrimps and worms, rather than large, struggling animals capable of breaking those fine teeth.

This makes the fossil particularly informative about evolutionary specialisation. Teeth are not simply more or less effective in some universal sense: their usefulness depends on what an animal eats and how it feeds. A robust tooth suited to restraining substantial prey and a fine tooth suited to retaining small organisms represent different solutions to different ecological problems. An adaptation can therefore open up one feeding opportunity while limiting another. Evolution produces such compromises because natural selection favours reproductive success under particular conditions, rather than engineering an organism that excels at everything.

Creationism In Crisis - An Extinct Egyptian Crocodile Fossil In the Same Rock The Sphynx Was Carved From - 45 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

[caption]

[credit]

The holotype skull (SMNS 10575) of H. cairensis n. gen. n. comb. (a) Photograph of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (b) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (c) photograph of SMNS 10575 in ventral view and (d) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in ventral view. Abbreviations: f, frontal; ic, internal choana; j, jugal; m, maxilla; ma, maxillary alveoli; n, nasals; o, orbit; oc, occipital condyle; p, parietal; pa, palatines; pf, prefrontal; po, postorbital; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; sof, suborbital fenestra; sq, squamosal; sqp, squamosal prong; stf, supratemporal fenestra. Scale bar, 10 mm.

From: Paul M. J. Burke, et al (2026)

New crocodile species discovered in rocks used to build the Great Sphinx | UCL News

The Great Sphinx of Giza is an ancient monument carved into something vastly more ancient: rocks recording a world that existed long before humans, let alone Egyptian civilisation. A newly recognised crocodilian from the same geological formation lived about 45 million years ago. For anyone attempting to reconcile Earth's history with a literal reading of Genesis and its young-Earth chronology, the difficulty begins with the material from which the monument itself was carved.

As UCL News reports, researchers have identified Herugavialis cairensis, an extinct gavial, or long-snouted crocodilian, from Egypt's Mokattam Formation. Its nearly complete skull was discovered in the 1920s and had long been assigned to Tomistoma, the genus containing today's false gharial. CT scanning revealed distinguishing anatomical features, including a raised ridge around the eyes, supporting its recognition as a separate genus. The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.

This is a useful example of how science corrects itself. A fossil does not cease to be informative because it has spent a century in a museum, and an identification does not become unchallengeable merely because generations of researchers have accepted it. Better tools and renewed scrutiny can expose distinctions that earlier investigators missed. Revising the classification strengthens our understanding of evolutionary history; it does not undermine the evidence that such a history occurred.

The animal also belonged to a very different Egypt. Shallow seas covered areas that are now land, and several gavial species inhabited its coastal waters. UCL describes a wider Mediterranean history in which crocodilian diversity fluctuated alongside changes in temperature and sea level, before the region lost its crocodilians around the Mediterranean drying crisis roughly six million years ago. Even that much later episode predates the conventional young-Earth creationist date for the entire Universe by orders of magnitude.

Creationism Refuted - A 700,000-Year-Old Elephant Tooth Shows The Bible's Authors Didn't Know Their Own Local History

An elephant tooth recovered from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY-NBA) — a prehistoric site in northern Israel, where early humans made stone tools some 700,000 years ago — has enabled researchers to reconstruct a lush Pleistocene landscape of woodlands, wetlands, and waterways. The findings provide a rare glimpse into the environment shared by giant elephants and some of the region's earliest human populations.

Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee and Hannah Farrell, University of Haifa.

The elephant remains were discovered alongside basalt handaxes and cleavers, hallmark tools of the Acheulian tradition, one of the earliest and most widespread stone-tool technologies in human history.

Credit: Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee and Hannah Farrell, University of Haifa

700,000-year-old elephant tooth reveals a lost ecosystem shared by early humans in the levant | EurekAlert!

Some 700,000 years ago, in what is now northern Israel, early humans were making stone tools in a landscape shared with giant elephants and exploiting their surroundings, hundreds of thousands of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism.

That alone presents an insurmountable chronological problem for anyone who insists that Genesis is a literal account of history; a problem compounded by the fact that this history occurred close to where the origin myths in Genesis were written by people who were conspicuously ignorant of even their own local history.

Now, an elephant tooth has helped researchers reconstruct something of the world those people inhabited. A study published in Quaternary Science Reviews examines remains of the extinct straight-tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, found alongside Acheulean handaxes and cleavers at North Bridge Acheulian–Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov. By combining CT imaging, dental wear, isotope analysis and pollen evidence from the sediments, the researchers reconstructed a mosaic of woodland, grassland, wetlands and waterways.

The resulting picture is of a resource-rich environment that could support both large mammals and early human populations. Reliable water and varied vegetation apparently helped this part of the Hula Valley function as an ecological refuge along the Levantine corridor linking Africa and Eurasia. This was an inhabited landscape with an ecological history, rather than merely a collection of ancient bones and stones.

Creationism In Crisis - How Breast Feeding Evolved - 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Professor Peishu Li coauthors Nature study uncovering ancient origins of mammalian suckling and swallowing

Some 165 million years before creationists imagine Earth existed, an aquatic relative of modern mammals was already carrying anatomical equipment associated with one of our most characteristic abilities: suckling milk. A newly described fossil from Inner Mongolia, China, adds another inconvenient chapter to the evolutionary history that young-Earth creationism insists never happened. Its significance extends beyond its age, however. It also preserves a revealing combination of ancestral and more modern features — precisely the sort of transitional anatomy that creationists routinely claim is missing from the fossil record.

The animal, Megacauda sungei, is described in a new paper in Nature. It belonged to the docodonts, an extinct branch of mammaliaforms, the broader group encompassing mammals and their closest extinct relatives. Living approximately 168–163 million years ago, it had a broad, flattened tail, swimming adaptations and specialised teeth suited to an animal diet. It was a functioning, specialised inhabitant of Jurassic freshwater environments, with an evolutionary history written into its anatomy.

Particularly informative are small bony projections near the back of the palate and specialised throat bones. In living mammals, comparable structures support the muscles and soft tissues involved in swallowing and suckling. Their presence in Megacauda suggests that important components of this feeding apparatus had already evolved by the Middle Jurassic. This does not mean that the fossil identifies the first animal to produce milk, or preserves a youngster caught feeding. The inference concerns the anatomical machinery that made mammal-like suckling and swallowing possible.

Refuting Creationism - The Earliest Aquatic Mammal Complete With Transitional Features - 120 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Holotype specimen of Dongoconodon platycauda

Reconstruction of the semi-aquatic life of Dongoconodon platycauda

Drawn by Chen Yu.

A joint study by Professor Bi Shundong of the School of Life Sciences at Yunnan University has discovered the earliest known swimming mammal to date.

Some 120 million years before anyone imagined a six-day creation, a small mammal in what is now northeastern China was combining features that refuse to fit the tidy categories creationists would like nature to obey. Dongoconodon platycauda had adaptations for swimming, an unusual pattern of tooth replacement, and an ear apparatus that retained a connection to its lower jaw. Here was a functioning animal with a mosaic of characteristics, illustrating how evolution modifies inherited structures without waiting for an entire collection of supposedly “mammalian” features to arrive together.

The nearly complete skeleton, from the Early Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Liaoning Province, is described by Shundong Bi and colleagues in Nature Communications. The research is also explained in institutional reports from Nanjing University and Yunnan University, both in Chinese.

Its broad hands and feet probably supported webbing, while its flattened, tapering tail appears to have helped with steering and stability. Comparisons with the skeletons of 124 living mammal species supported a semiaquatic lifestyle. This adds to the evidence that mammals living alongside dinosaurs occupied a much wider range of ecological niches than the familiar image of small, uniformly shrew-like creatures might suggest.

Creationism Refuted - A Previously Unknown Extinct Yak - Evolved 400,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI depiction of yak on the Tibetan Plateau

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Map showing the locations and sample sizes of sites from which yak X genomes were generated. Extant wild yak distribution is in light orange.¹⁶ Elevation is shown. Map not to scale.

From Oppenheimer, Jonas; et al (2026)

Previously unknown extinct bovine species discovered in Siberia - Stockholms universitet

For young-Earth creationists, the problem with ancient DNA is that it keeps revealing histories which their preferred chronology cannot accommodate. The latest example is an extinct relative of the yak whose evolutionary separation from living yaks began at least 400,000 years ago — long before the supposed “Creation Week” of a literal reading of Genesis. Its existence has emerged from fragments of Siberian bone too incomplete to identify by their shape, but which retained something much more informative: genetic evidence of a lost branch of the bovine family tree.

In a study published in Current Biology, Jonas Oppenheimer, Alexandre Gilardet and colleagues report 20 ancient nuclear genomes from Denisova Cave and other sites in southern Siberia, spanning more than 200,000 years. The lineage, provisionally known as “yak X”, had previously been recognised from mitochondrial DNA. The new analysis provides much broader genetic evidence that it represented a distinct species that effectively separated from the lineage leading to living yaks by about 250,000 years ago.

This was no static population inhabiting an unchanging world. The genomes reveal a demographic decline and suggest population turnover, accompanied by reduced genetic diversity, around the last interglacial, approximately 130,000–115,000 years ago. Warming may have disrupted the distribution of these cold-adapted animals; an earlier warm interval may also have helped isolate populations during their initial divergence. Those climatic explanations remain hypotheses, but the genetic evidence provides a record against which they can be tested. The youngest specimen analysed is about 27,000 years old; precisely when, and why, the lineage subsequently disappeared remains unknown.

There is an equally instructive lesson in the researchers’ caution. Although they interpret the genomic evidence as identifying a separate species, they have not simply attached a new formal species name to these fragmentary remains. Comparisons with previously described yak-like fossils are needed to establish whether the genetic lineage corresponds to an animal already recognised from its anatomy. Discovering a previously unrecognised genetic history and resolving its taxonomic identity are related but distinct tasks. Scientific confidence in one does not require pretending that the other has already been settled.

For creationism, meanwhile, calling the animal “just another member of the cattle kind” does nothing to resolve the chronological problem. The evidence concerns a branching history of populations, divergence and eventual extinction extending across hundreds of thousands of years. Evolutionary biology supplies the framework for reconstructing that history and asking further questions about it. Compressing everything into a few thousand years would require an alternative explanation for the genetic relationships, the ages of the remains and the succession of populations — not merely a biblical label applied after the evidence has been collected.

Malevolent Design - How Ancient Viral DNA Gave Humans An Advantage But Can Be Co-Opted By Lung Cancer - Malevolent Design, Incompetence or Evolution?

AI depiction of the ancient retroviral DNA that is essential for embryo development but can help lung cancer cells survive too

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Post-gastrulation amnioids - models with mimic the development of the amniotic sac forming as expected (top panel). Amnioids without a key calcium-buffering gene and its accompanying switch don't form as expected (bottom two panels).

Credit: Borzo Gharibi, Science Advances (2026).

An ancient advantage, hijacked by cancer | Crick

Some 13 million years before anyone could have written a creation myth, a retrovirus inserted its genetic material into the genome of an ancestral ape. Today, part of that viral legacy helps regulate early human development. This presents creationists with several difficulties at once: a history vastly older than their biblical chronology permits, genetic material acquired from a virus, and an evolutionary innovation produced by putting an existing sequence to a new use. There is also an uncomfortable sting in the tail for advocates of a benevolent intelligent designer: cancer cells can exploit the same biological machinery.

The research, reported in Science Advances, concerns a remnant of an ancient retrovirus known as HERVH. This sequence acts as a switch controlling a form of calbindin, a protein involved in buffering calcium inside cells. Removing the switch or calbindin disrupted the growth and developmental behaviour of human embryonic stem cells and the organisation of models of early embryonic structures.

The evolutionary distinction matters. The original acquisition of viral DNA represents horizontal genetic transfer: genetic material crossed from a virus into its host, rather than arriving through ordinary inheritance from a parent. Once incorporated into the germ line, however, that material could pass vertically through successive generations. Its recruitment to regulate a host gene is an example of exaptation — the co-option of an existing feature for a different function. The virus did not need to invent calbindin, nor did evolution need to create an entirely new protein from scratch. A new regulatory relationship could arise by combining material with different evolutionary histories.

This is precisely the sort of process obscured by the creationist slogan that new genetic “information” requires an intelligent author. Biologically useful novelty can involve changes in when, where and how an existing gene is expressed. Imported DNA can supply a regulatory element; subsequent evolution can preserve and modify its contribution. Calling the result “information” does not erase the natural processes that produced it, still less establish that someone intended the outcome.

The chronology is equally inconvenient. Comparative primate evidence places this insertion roughly 13 million years ago, after the lineage leading to humans and the African great apes had separated from the orangutan lineage. Orangutans are themselves great apes; the relevant event occurred within the broader great-ape family tree. Either way, this is inherited molecular history extending far beyond the few thousand years allowed by a literal young-Earth reading of Genesis.

Yet a mechanism useful during development need not remain beneficial in every context. Earlier research showed that lung squamous cell carcinoma can activate this viral switch, helping cancer cells avoid senescence — a state in which cells stop dividing. The cancer biology is complex, but the central evolutionary point is clear: machinery that supports normal development can also become available for malignant cells to exploit.

That is consistent with an evolutionary cost-benefit trade-off. Natural selection can preserve a developmental advantage despite a vulnerability elsewhere in life; it has no foresight with which to guarantee lifelong protection from every possible consequence. But if intelligent-design advocates insist that useful genetic arrangements demonstrate deliberate engineering, they must apply that reasoning consistently. A designer credited with the developmental benefit cannot simply be excused responsibility for the exploitable weakness. On their own premises, the result raises questions about competence, benevolence, or even malevolent design. Evolution requires no such theological contortions: an ancient infection, inherited variation and the opportunistic reuse of existing material are sufficient ingredients for the story.

Creationism Refuted - Polynesian Genetics Refute Biblical Mythology And Confirm Evolutionary Theory

AI depiction of Polynesian migration in outrigger canoes

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Hawai'ian outrigger (Holopuni) canoe

Polynesian Wayfinding Is Written in the Genomes of Island Populations

Human history is written in more than ancient texts. It is also preserved in the genetic material passed from generation to generation, where migrations and changes in population size leave patterns that scientists can investigate. For creationists who would compress humanity’s ancestry into the descendants of a single family emerging from a mythical global flood, this presents a demanding test: their story must explain the actual distribution of genetic variation, rather than merely assert that people dispersed.

A new study published in Science on 8 October 2026 examines whole-genome sequences from 1,050 Polynesian people. It reveals successive founder effects associated with the settlement of Pacific islands: small founding groups carried only part of their source population’s genetic diversity, and subsequent departures repeated that sampling process.

The result is a nested pattern of inheritance. Particularly striking is the close genetic relationship between the populations of Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui, despite their separation by roughly 7,000 kilometres. The researchers interpret this as evidence that both populations have deeper ancestral roots in Mangareva. Their reconstruction also involves repeated movement between islands, rather than a simple procession of isolated, one-way journeys.

These demographic events have medical consequences too. Variants that were rare in an ancestral population can become relatively common among descendants of a small founding group. The study identifies several disease-associated variants at elevated frequencies, showing how the legacy of settlement can remain relevant to health today.

This is also an accessible example of why evolution cannot be reduced to natural selection alone. Genetic drift — chance changes in the frequencies of genetic variants — can shape populations without making them better adapted. A variant does not have to be beneficial to become more common; sometimes its frequency reflects who happened to found a community and which descendants subsequently reproduced. The voyages were purposeful human achievements, but their genetic consequences required neither foresight nor a designer.

The challenge for biblical literalism is therefore more substantial than finding room for Polynesian voyagers somewhere after Noah. A scientific explanation must account for which populations share particular variants, how those variants are distributed, and which demographic history best explains the pattern. These findings do not, by themselves, constitute a test of every claim about a global flood. They do demonstrate what an evidence-based account of human dispersal looks like: a reconstruction open to scrutiny and revision, with consequences that can be checked against independent evidence. Simply invoking Genesis supplies none of that explanatory detail.

Refuting Creationism - Stone Tool-Making In The Tennessee River Valley - 3,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tool-making on the banks of the Tennessee River, 13,000 years ago

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Map showing the location of the Tennessee River Valley and the distribution of Clovis and Cumberland points with known provenience data. Hatching indicates geologic deposits containing chert-bearing deposits. Inset indicates the location of study area.

Tune, J.W., Miller, D.S. (2027).

Ancient Tools Reveal How Ice Age Humans Learned the Land | Ole Miss

Some 13,000 years ago, people in what is now the Tennessee River Valley were making stone spear points, maintaining their equipment and adapting to the demands of their surroundings. For young-Earth creationism, this presents a rather fundamental difficulty: these human societies were living in North America thousands of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’. They were getting on with the practical business of survival before a literal reading of Genesis permits either them or their continent to have existed.

These inconvenient people are the subject of a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory by Jesse W. Tune and D. Shane Miller. The researchers examined approximately 500 projectile points from the region, comparing the earlier Clovis tradition with the later Cumberland tradition. Their question was how the treatment of these tools might reveal changes in people’s knowledge of the landscape.

The contrast was revealing. Clovis toolmakers tended to resharpen their points more extensively, extracting more use from the stone before discarding it. Cumberland toolmakers more often discarded points with useful life remaining. The authors interpret this as evidence that growing familiarity with local stone sources changed the economics of keeping or replacing a tool. People uncertain where their next suitable supply would come from had stronger reasons to conserve what they already carried; later communities could draw on knowledge accumulated and transmitted across generations.

That explanation is an inference tested against patterns in the artefacts, not a direct observation of prehistoric intentions. The distinction matters: archaeology can compare explanations of ancient behaviour without pretending that discarded tools tell us everything about the people who made them. What is not dependent on accepting this particular explanation is the broader chronological problem for creationists. These toolmaking traditions belong to the closing stages of the last Ice Age, well before the 6,000–10,000-year timescale commonly assigned to the entire universe by young-Earth believers.

Nor does the wider evidence support a recent arrival from the Mesopotamian world of biblical mythology. This particular study does not investigate ancestry, but ancient DNA research places Indigenous American origins within a much older population history involving northeast Asia and Beringia, the region that once connected Siberia and Alaska. There is no evidential basis here for replacing that history with a recent dispersal from Babel or a repopulation of the Americas by Noah’s descendants. The biblical account supplies the assertion; the archaeological and genetic records supply a different history.

What emerges is a recognisably human story of ingenuity, experience and cultural inheritance. Long before the supposed beginning of the world, people were already making decisions about resources, refining their technologies and passing useful knowledge to the next generation. Science asks how those societies lived and learned. Young-Earth creationism must first explain how they managed to exist before its creation date.

Refuting Creationism - More Problems for Creationists As Science Reveals Yet More Evidence Falsifying The Bible Creation Myth

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, 543 Millian Years Ago

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, Southwest Africa, 543 million years ago.

Credit: Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford / Mighty Fossils.

New study suggests animals may have evolved vastly earlier than fossil evidence suggests | Oxford University

One of the strengths of science is that its conclusions remain open to revision. An assumption that once appeared reasonable can be tested against new evidence, found wanting, and replaced with something better. For creationists, who frequently portray such revisions as evidence that science cannot be trusted, this must seem a peculiar way of acquiring knowledge. Yet it is precisely how science improves its understanding: by allowing the evidence to correct the explanation, rather than requiring the evidence to conform to a predetermined answer.

A new study published in Science Advances provides another example. Researchers have challenged an assumption used in some recent estimates of when animals originated. Their analyses support an origin approximately 700–800 million years ago, potentially extending animal evolutionary history by around 200 million years beyond estimates based on a younger maximum-age constraint.

The issue is a deceptively simple one: if a fossil deposit preserves microscopic organisms in exquisite detail, but contains no definite animals, does that mean animals had not yet evolved? Some researchers have used the approximately 590-million-year-old Weng’an Biota of China in this way, reasoning that animals would have been preserved there had they existed. Its lack of unequivocal animal fossils has therefore helped set a proposed upper age limit for animal origins.

The new research exposes a difficulty with that reasoning. The younger Kheseen Biota of Mongolia also preserves exceptionally detailed microfossils, yet none can confidently be identified as animals. In this case, however, animals are known from other deposits of comparable age. Their absence from Kheseen therefore cannot demonstrate their absence from the world. Particular environments and conditions of fossilisation can leave animals out of the record, even when other organisms are beautifully preserved.

This matters because molecular clocks — methods that use genetic differences between living organisms to estimate when their ancestors diverged — require calibration against geological and fossil evidence. Change an unjustified age constraint, and the resulting estimates can change substantially. Using alternative constraints from older deposits, the researchers recovered a much earlier possible origin for animals. They have not discovered an 800-million-year-old animal, nor established a final date for the animal kingdom’s beginnings. They have shown why one argument for restricting those beginnings to a much later interval is unreliable.

For young-Earth creationism, neither chronology offers any comfort. The debate concerns events hundreds of millions of years ago, not whether animal history can be squeezed into the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. Uncertainty over precisely when animals originated does not make every proposed date equally credible, any more than uncertainty over a mountain’s exact height makes it plausibly a molehill.

Creationism Refuted - Earth Fine-Tuned For Regular Mass Extinctions - Even In The American Bible-Belt

AAI-generated reconstruction of a Late Devonian coastline, with reef life beneath the distant impact.

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Meteor hit Oklahoma 100 Million Years Later Than Previously Thought | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

A geological map noting the types of rock that make up the Ames impact structure. The locations of oil and gas wells are noted with arrows.

Credit: Catlos et al.

For a planet supposedly created as a perfect home for humans, Earth has a remarkable history of catastrophes, environmental upheavals and mass extinctions — almost all of it unfolding before humans and, according to a literal reading of Genesis, before even Earth itself existed. Beneath Ames, Oklahoma, lies a buried impact crater that adds another uncomfortable detail to that history. New research suggests that the collision responsible occurred about 100 million years later than previously thought. Unfortunately for young-Earth creationists, that still places it approximately 370 million years before their imagined ‘Creation Week’.

The study, led by Elizabeth Catlos of the University of Texas at Austin and published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, challenges the long-standing assignment of the Ames impact to the Ordovician Period. The previous age estimate relied on conodont fossils — tiny tooth-like elements from extinct marine animals. These may have been inherited from older rocks disturbed and redeposited during the impact, rather than recording when the collision happened.

Uranium–lead dating of zircon crystals from the impacted rocks now points towards a much younger, Late Devonian event. The youngest dated zircons yielded an age of 369.7 ± 5.9 million years. That range overlaps the approximately 372-million-year-old Frasnian–Famennian extinction crisis, raising the possibility that Ames belongs in discussions of impacts associated with that episode of ecological devastation.

There is an essential distinction here: an overlap in estimated ages does not establish cause and effect. The study does not demonstrate that the Ames impact caused the Frasnian–Famennian extinction, or even that it made a substantial contribution. Further work is needed to strengthen the connection between the zircon dates and the impact itself, let alone establish a causal connection with the extinction. That uncertainty is part of the scientific account, not something to hide for the sake of a more dramatic headline.

Nevertheless, the difficulty for creationism does not depend on proving that particular connection. Whether the collision happened in the Ordovician or the Devonian, neither interpretation can be accommodated within the few thousand years allowed by a literalist reading of Genesis. Revising an event’s age by roughly 100 million years does not bring it within reach of biblical chronology. Even the size of the correction dwarfs the entire history young-Earth creationists allow the universe.

Nor does a world exposed to devastating collisions suggest that human safety was its overriding design specification. Humans were absent when Ames formed, but that is precisely the point: Earth’s history was not a brief preparation of a finished home awaiting its intended occupants. It was an immense succession of changing environments in which life survived, diversified and sometimes suffered catastrophic losses. Habitability is not a guarantee of protection, and our existence today does not turn every feature of the planet’s past into evidence of benevolent planning.