Refuting Creationism - Ancient Duck DNA Shows Us Why The Bible Is Literally Wrong

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A wave of scientific knowledge engulfing creationist ignorance

With apologies to Katsushika Hokusai.

Ancient DNA from an extinct native duck reveals how far birds flew to make New Zealand home

Scientists never set out to prove that the Biblical account of science and history as related in Genesis is hopelessly wrong and based on the childish guesses of scientifically illiterate people—that is simply an incidental outcome of the facts they revealed. Nevertheless, it remains a fact. The Bible presents a timeline and an account of the origin of species that are wholly inconsistent with the known facts.

To be fair to the original authors, they probably never intended to mislead scientifically illiterate people thousands of years later. As they devised origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge of the world, they could hardly have imagined that someone would one day write their tales down, combine them with other implausible myths, genealogies, and morality stories designed to spread fear and enhance priestly power, and then declare the compilation to be the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god. That declaration, of course, reinforced the text’s usefulness as a source of excuses for actions such as land theft, genocide, and enslavement—atrocities conveniently blamed on a god to absolve perpetrators of personal responsibility.

Refuting Creationism - What An Extinct Duck Tells Us About Evolution

An artist’s depiction of the Rēkohu shelduck.

Credit: Sasha Votyakova/Te Papa, CC BY-ND

The Paradise shelduck, Tadorna variegata, the closest relative of the Rēkohu shelduck

The discovery of an extinct shelduck highlights the rich ancient biodiversity of the remote Rēkohu Chatham Islands

Remote islands are the sort of environment biologists might dream up if asked to design a natural laboratory for testing evolution. It’s no coincidence that Darwin was inspired to develop his theory while visiting the Galápagos Islands and noticing how the finches had adapted in different ways to the conditions on each island.

Another striking example comes from the Rēkohu Chatham Islands, about 785 kilometres east of mainland Aotearoa New Zealand. The islands rose in their present form around 3.5 million years ago, effectively resetting the clock for the ecosystems that would develop there. Species arriving from elsewhere had to make do with what traits they already carried, and only those suited to island life survived. Most new arrivals were birds, insects, or wind-blown plants carried there by chance. With few predators and limited competition, these colonists had the perfect opportunity to go their own evolutionary way.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Piece of DNA That's So Unkind To Creationists

A Genetic Twist that Sets Humans Apart

Humans and chimpanzees share about 98–99% of their DNA, so the vast differences between us must lie within that small fraction where we differ.

Humans have no organs or structures that chimpanzees don’t also have; the differences are mainly in relative size and proportion. In other words, they’re quantitative, not qualitative. But that doesn’t stop creationists solemnly declaring that we are a totally different “kind” — a human “kind” — while chimps are lumped with gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans into the “ape kind.” Two bins, job done.

Creationists insist that no “kind” could have evolved from another because that would require brand-new organs and “new genetic information,” something they claim is impossible. Instead, they set up a straw man, accusing scientists of believing new genes and structures simply pop into existence out of thin air, like some sort of Darwinian magic trick, while insisting no one can explain how it works. (Apparently, gene duplication, mutation, and selection don’t count when you’ve decided in advance that the answer must be wrong.)

But when it comes to humans and chimpanzees, their reasoning ties itself in knots. Humans can’t have evolved from a chimp-like ancestor, they say, because that would be “macro-evolution.” Except when it isn’t. Lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and house cats are all just one happy “cat kind,” because in that case there was obviously no “macro-evolution” — only “variation.” So, if evolution produces cats, that’s “micro-evolution.” If it produces humans, it’s “macro-evolution,” and therefore impossible. Heads I win, tails you lose.

In reality, the major differences between humans and chimpanzees aren’t about inventing new bits and pieces, but in how the same components developed. The key lies in relative sizes of bones, muscles, and teeth — and above all in the brain: not new parts, but differences in growth, proportion, and how the brain is wired.

Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shown that part of that small genetic difference — specifically a stretch of DNA called HAR123 — acts as an enhancer controlling brain growth and development. In other words, the real evolutionary leap wasn’t the conjuring up of brand-new organs from nowhere, but changes in how existing genes fine-tuned brain development. The decisive shift came not from what parts the brain has, but from how large they grew and the ratio of cell types — glial cells and neurons — within them.

Refuting Creationism - A Human And An Australopithecine Co-Existed - 2.7 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Arrowsmith (left) and ASU Associate Professor Christopher Campisano examine the geology near the Asboli Homo teeth site

Photo by Virginia Commonwealth University Professor Amy Rector

ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor | ASU News

It is generally accepted by palaeoanthropologists that the genus Homo evolved from an Australopithecus species somewhere in East Africa, most likely in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen “Lucy” was found. However, it is now widely recognised that the hominin evolutionary tree was far from straightforward, resembling more a tangled bush with side-branches that went extinct, rather than a simple, linear progression.

Given the tendency of our ancestors to diversify and occasionally interbreed, it is entirely possible that the genus Homo emerged from a hybrid population, or even that early Homo back-bred with ancestral australopithecines — especially when two or more species lived in close proximity, as new evidence suggests they did in the Afar region.

Maps showing (left) the location of the Ledi-Geraru site within the Horn of Africa on the left, and the location of the Australopithecus and Homo teeth on the right

Images by Penn State Associate Research Professor Erin DiMaggio.

Fossils of a previously unknown Australopithecus species and of early Homo have been found in the same area, apparently coexisting. The newly discovered australopithecine is known only from teeth, and there is currently insufficient information to formally name the species. Teeth are often distinctive enough to indicate a previously unrecognised species, but palaeoanthropologists usually require additional skeletal remains — such as jaws, skulls, or postcranial bones — to confirm unique anatomical features and avoid naming a species prematurely.

Of course, because evolution operates over entire populations and across thousands of years, the distinction between the immediately ancestral Australopithecus and the descendant Homo is inherently arbitrary. It likely means far more to modern palaeoanthropologists than it ever did to the hominins themselves.

This new evidence, discovered by an international team working on The Ledi-Geraru Research Project, led by scientists at Arizona State University, indicates that both the unidentified Australopithecus and early Homo lived in the area between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The age estimates were reliably established using volcanic ash layers immediately above and below the fossil-bearing strata. The team’s findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - The Grand Canyon Is a Treasure Trove Of Cambrian Fossils - From 500 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

View of the Grand Canyon from the Colorado River.

Jason Muhlbauer

Grand Canyon was a ‘Goldilocks zone’ for the evolution of early animals

One of the things about American creationism that many people in the rest of the world find endearing—if not more than a little irritating—is the ignorant parochialism that underpins so much of it. For example, it is part of the creationist narrative that the Grand Canyon is “proof” of the biblical flood because, so they assert, the layers were laid down during the flood and the canyon was then gouged out by the floodwaters running away. This also plays neatly into the biblical flat Earth idea, because they assume the floodwaters went somewhere—presumably over the edge—having been magically piled up for the best part of a year until the magic was removed.

And of course, it all happened in America, where the important things always happen and where anything that happens is important—when Jesus returns, it will be to America; America is the place God is preparing for Jesus’s return, and so on.

So the recent open-access paper in Science Advances by an international team of palaeontologists led by scientists from Cambridge University, UK, reporting that the Grand Canyon is a rich source of fossils from the Cambrian biota, will no doubt come as a shock to American creationists.

Refuting Creationism - How Denisovans Created Modern Non-African Humans

A reconstruction of the hominin source of the ‘Dragon Man’ cranium in his habitat. The fossil has now been identified as coming from a Denisovan.

Chuang Zhao

An artist's rendering shows the first-ever portrait of a Denisovan woman, recreated from an ancient DNA sample.

Maayan Harel.

New insights into the Denisovans – the new hominin group that interbred with modern day humans - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

There is increasing evidence that the human evolutionary story is far richer and more complex than was once assumed, back when many expected a neat series of fossils showing a linear descent from a single African ancestor.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Bronze Age human-origin myth in the Bible has about as much historical credibility as Enid Blyton’s Noddy’s Adventures in Toyland — and at least Blyton never claimed her stories were literal truth or the basis of moral authority. Unlike creation myths, Noddy’s adventures were always meant for the nursery, not the classroom.

We now understand that hominin populations frequently split into regional varieties which diversified as more or less isolated groups, only to merge again later into a single population. This process appears to have begun even as we were diverging from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. For around a million years after that split, interbreeding remained possible, with chimpanzee genes entering the hominin genome and vice versa.

The interbreeding that most shaped modern, non-African Homo sapiens occurred when African H. sapiens encountered Neanderthals—or their immediate ancestors—during successive waves of migration, permitted by changes in climate and geography. These contacts culminated in the last and only successful migration between roughly 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals themselves were descended from an earlier migration that had followed H. erectus into Eurasia, later splitting into Neanderthals in western Eurasia and Denisovans in eastern and south-eastern Eurasia. Modern genomics now shows that it was the Denisovans who contributed even more to the ancestry of non-African H. sapiens than the Neanderthals did. The Denisovans—likely to be reclassified as H. longi, the name given to a skull found in China—appear to have diversified into populations adapted to environments as varied as the Tibetan Plateau and the subtropical coasts of Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Austronesia.

Refuting Creationism - Another Plethora of Transitional Fossils - From 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

iv> Fresh fossil finds in Africa shed light on the era before Earth’s largest mass extinction | UW News

An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the late Permian in the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. The scene includes several saber-toothed gorgonopsians and beaked dicynodonts.

Gabriel Ugueto

Another day, and another clutch of transitional fossils from millions of years before “Creation Week” for creationists to lie about, misrepresent, or simply ignore in order to cope with the resulting cognitive dissonance. This time, it’s not just a single research paper, but a series of 14 published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The fossils are the result of 15 years of excavation at three sites in Africa and cover the 47-million-year Permian era, which ended with the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — the mass extinction at the end of the Permian in which an estimated 70% of species became extinct. Not only is that timeline fatal to those creationists who like to imagine the Earth and life on it are just 6,000 to 10,000 years old, but the fact of a mass extinction raises insurmountable problems for intelligent design advocates. They would need to explain the intelligence behind designing species only to have them wiped out by a climate catastrophe — one which should have been anticipated by an omniscient designer and could have been prevented by an omnipotent god.

And of course, another problem for creationists is the abundance of these transitional fossils, which, according to creationist dogma, should not exist at all.

Refuting Creationism - Science Fills A Whale Of A Gap - No Gods Found

Janjucetus dullardi calf and mother swimming through the shallow seas off Victoria, 25 million years ago.

Art by Ruairidh Duncan

A cornucopia of tiny, bizarre whales used to live in Australian waters – here’s one of them - Museums Victoria

My last blog post concluded with:

Science moves forward by explaining these transitions; creationism survives only by ignoring them. With each gap that closes, their god has less room to hide, and the story of life becomes clearer without invoking the supernatural.

So, the prediction that more gap-closing transitional fossils would soon be found was hardly a bold one.

And sure enough, along comes just such a paper. To rub salt in creationists’ wounds, like the subject of my previous blog post on transitional penguin fossils, this one is also published by Oxford University Press in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London—the society to which Darwin and Wallace presented their ground-breaking 1858 papers On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, or, to put it another way, On the Origin of Species.

This new paper fills an important gap in the evolution of whales. It was written by Erich Fitzgerald of Museums Victoria Research Institute, Ruairidh Duncan of Monash University, Victoria, Australia, and colleagues. The discovery and its significance are explained in an article in The Conversation by Erich Fitzgerald and Ruairidh Duncan. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, a brief background on the evolution of whales:

Creationism in Crisis - Transitional Penguin Fossils From New Zealand - 60 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artistic representation of a North Canterbury beach some 62 millions years ago.

Canterbury Museum and Tom Simpson, CC BY-SA

Dagger beaks and strong wings: new fossils rewrite the penguin story and affirm NZ as a cradle of their evolution.

One of the most glaring flaws in creationist reasoning — among the many — is its desperate reliance on gaps in knowledge as hiding places for their putative god. It’s a strategy that ensures their god grows ever smaller and often vanishes entirely as science steadily closes those gaps. This “god of the gaps” approach is ultimately doomed—either to complete collapse or to a never-ending scramble for new gaps, real or imagined, in the forlorn hope that this time, unlike every other, the gap will contain the one thing they crave: a god that cannot be explained away.

One such gap — of which creationists so far seem blissfully unaware, or we would never hear the end of it — is the evolutionary transition between the flying ancestors of penguins and the modern, flightless penguins whose skeletons have adapted from an aerial to a marine existence. This transformation involved all the changes needed to turn wings into powerful flippers for ‘flying’ underwater, a more upright gait, and feathers adapted for life in the water and for the cold of the Antarctic environment where most species now live.

That gap has just been substantially filled by the discovery of a large collection of ancient penguin fossils in the Waipara Greensand Formation in New Zealand, north of Canterbury. This formation spans roughly 62.5 to 58 million years ago—a period of some 4.5 million years, beginning only a few million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. With every such discovery, the supposed “mystery” shrinks a little more—and the god wedged into it fades further into irrelevance. How these fossils fill the gap in our knowledge of penguin evolution is the subject of an article in The Conversation by two palaeontologists from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand: Vanesa De Pietri, Senior Research Fellow in Palaeontology, and Paul Scofield, Adjunct Professor in Palaeontology. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, some background information on the Waipara Greensand Formation:

Refuting Creationism - More On What The Bible's Authors Got Badly Wrong

A sea monster and a Tarantula ESA/Hubble

The enduring mystery is why, when they can read the first few verses of the Bible and compare it to what science reveals about the universe, or planet and the life on it, do so many people still insist it is inerrant historical and scientific truths reveal by an inerrant, omniscience creator god?

There must be some deep psychological need to believe that absurdity to perform the necessary mental gymnastics required to dismiss the science and stick with the evidence free superstitions that the science overthrows, which can only be guessed at? A personal stake, as with the priests and grifters who wring a living out of their credulous followers, maybe? A justification for holding otherwise unacceptable prejudices for which an excuse can be found in the Bible, with careful scrutiny and maybe changing the meanings of a few words here and there, or by applying the brutal tribal social norms that the Bible prescribes? Whatever the cause, the self-delusion needed to retain belief against the deluge of counter-evidence, often caries kudos in religious societies such as in America's 'Bible Belt' states and inner city ghettos where admitting to doubt or even hinting at accepting the science can carry a heavy social penalty.

So, the tidal wave of scientific evidence keeps breaking on the rocks of ignorant stupidity reinforced by sea wall of social coercive control and psychological fear akin to an acute anxiety disorder or theophobic psychosis.

A scene from a star-forming factory shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week. This Hubble picture captures incredible details in the dusty clouds in a star-forming region called the Tarantula Nebula. What’s possibly the most amazing aspect of this detailed image is that this nebula isn’t even in our galaxy. Instead, it’s in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is located about 160 000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.

The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known, some of which are roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. The scene pictured here is located away from the centre of the nebula, where there is a super star cluster called R136, but very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.

This nebula is a frequent target for Hubble, whose multiwavelength capabilities are critical for capturing sculptural details in the nebula’s dusty clouds. The data used to create this image come from an observing programme called Scylla, named for a multi-headed sea monster from the Greek myth of Ulysses. The Scylla programme was designed to complement another Hubble observing programme called ULLYSSES (Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards). ULLYSSES targets massive young stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, while Scylla investigates the structures of gas and dust that surround these stars.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, N. Bartmann (ESA/Hubble)
Music: Stellardrone - Ascent.

So, here is another wave of facts that might just dislodge a tenacious limpet of ignorance:

Malevolent Design - How 'Intelligent Design' Exposes Divine Malevolence

Schistosoma mansoni

Schistosoma mansoni

Parasitic Worms Evolved to Suppress Neurons in Skin - AAI News

It gets tedious repeating this point so often, but so long as creationists keep using what they claim is irreducible complexity and/or complex specified genetic information as evidence for intelligent design, they need to be reminded that the same argument can also be used as evidence of their putative designer’s malevolence.

Creationists, of course, ignore the fact that parasites are no less “designed” than humans and have structures and processes that are “irreducibly complex” and depend on “complex specified information” in order to succeed in their environments. Yet their existence, and how they interact with and even manipulate their hosts, inevitably increases suffering in the world – a theological problem that creationist disinformation organisations such as the Discovery Institute avoid like the plague.

Parasite–host relationships also inevitably involve evolutionary arms races – the antithesis of intelligence if both “sides” are supposedly designed by the same designer.

So, to keep reminding them: if their justification for designating their god as the designer of living systems holds true, then it is also justification for designating the same god as the cause of suffering. Here is another example of a parasite that falls within their definition of an organism “designed” to do what it does and to participate in an arms race with its host in order to do so. This concerns the discovery that the parasitic worm Schistosoma mansoni, which causes schistosomiasis, is able to suppress neurons in the skin to evade detection as it burrows into its victim’s body (usually the leg).

Refuting Creationism - Just How Wrong Could The Bible's Authors Be?

The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens.

Credit: NASA/ESA (CC BY 4.0)

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

'Most massive black hole ever discovered' is detected | The Royal Astronomical Society

The authors of Genesis got so much so badly wrong that it’s difficult to find anything they got right — but the hardest place to find even a sliver of accuracy is their description of the universe. With their naïve attempt to explain the existence of different kinds of animals, they at least recognised that there were different species. Their notion of magical creation out of nothing, without ancestry, was of course laughably wrong, but at least they knew there were distinct organisms requiring explanation.

By contrast, in their picture of the cosmos — centred on a small, flat world with a solid dome (the “firmament”) over it—about the only things they got right were the existence of Earth, the Sun and Moon, and “the stars”. Everything else was subsumed into that one word: “stars”, a bucket that included the visible planets, distant suns, and entire galaxies, all imagined as lights fixed to the dome, with the Sun and Moon set within it.

In short, almost everything in that description is wrong—not just what things are, but where they are. They spoke about light, but knew nothing of its nature. That they noticed that light comes from luminous bodies is probably the only thing they got right.

Black Holes: Nature’s Most Extreme Objects. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so intense that nothing—not even light—can escape. They form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity or through the merger of smaller black holes.

Event Horizon

The vent horizon is the “point of no return” surrounding a black hole. Once anything crosses it, escape is impossible. From outside, the event horizon appears as a dark sphere; it’s not a physical surface but a boundary defined by relativity.

Singularity

At the very centre, according to general relativity, lies a singularity — a point where density and spacetime curvature become infinite, and the known laws of physics break down. In reality, quantum effects are expected to smooth out this infinity, but a complete theory of quantum gravity is needed to describe it properly.

Relativity vs Quantum Physics

Black holes are unique because they combine two regimes of physics:

• Einstein’s general relativity describes how they warp spacetime.
• Quantum mechanics governs the behaviour of particles and energy at extremely small scales.

The crossover between these domains lies deep inside the black hole, in a region near the singularity sometimes called the quantum gravity zone, where spacetime curvature reaches the Planck scale and neither theory works alone. This is not the event horizon, as is sometimes said; the event horizon is still very much part of the Relativity domain.
The Firewall Hypothesis

Stephen Hawking and others noted a paradox: quantum theory predicts that information cannot be destroyed, yet anything crossing an event horizon seems lost forever. One proposed resolution is the firewall hypothesis: instead of passing smoothly through, anything hitting the horizon would be incinerated by a burst of high-energy radiation. This “firewall” would break relativity’s expectation that crossing the horizon is uneventful (for a large black hole) but would preserve quantum theory’s rules.

Open Questions

• Does the singularity really exist, or is it replaced by something else in a quantum theory of gravity?
• Do firewalls exist, or is there a different resolution to the black hole information paradox?
• Can Hawking radiation—tiny energy leaks predicted by quantum field theory—eventually cause black holes to evaporate completely?

Black holes remain one of physics’ most powerful testing grounds, where the deepest laws of nature are pushed to their limits.

And of course, they could have known nothing about black holes, or about the relationship between mass and gravity that explains them and governs the motions of the “stars”.

A point I’ve made here before — worth making again — is that we can be certain the Bible was not written by a creator god by seeing how much of it is flatly wrong. Much of it can’t even be rescued as meaningful metaphor or allegory—the standard apologetic for obvious falsehoods. It is simply, unarguably, and unambiguously wrong on multiple levels.

If a creator god had written it as a vital message to humankind, why did it not include anything unknown at the time in unmistakable terms, as proof of divine authorship and omniscience? Why, for example, did it not tell us about atoms, germs, or galaxies; that Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting the Sun along with other planets; or explain the relationship between mass and gravity and why black holes exist?

Why not? Because the authors of the Bible were ignorant of these things. They were not creator gods, but ancient Near Eastern writers doing their best to invent plausible narratives within their cultural preconceptions — of a spirit-filled world that ran on magic — when everything they knew lay within a few days’ walk of home in the hills of Canaan.

So, compare their description of the universe as they imagined it with what science now shows us: in this case, an ultramassive black hole revealed by how its gravity bends light from a background galaxy into an “Einstein ring”, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The description comes from the Royal Astronomical Society news release and the open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

First, let's see how the Bible's author described the entire universe as they saw it without the benefit of scientific instruments or theoretical physics:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1.6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

Now compare that to this image of a tiny fragment of it that astronomers at the Royal Astronomical Society have just released. It shows the gravity lensing effect and the resulting Einstein ring. Ber in mind that this is a tiny fragment of the universe that would be entirely hidden by a grain of rice held between the thumb and forefinger of your outstretched arm. There is absolutely nothing to compare it with in the Bible, obviously.

'Most massive black hole ever discovered' is detected

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Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected.

The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

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The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens.
The newly discovered ultramassive blackhole lies at the centre of the orange galaxy. Far behind it is a blue galaxy that is being warped into the horseshoe shaped ring by distortions in spacetime created by the immense mass of the foreground orange galaxy.

Credit: NASA/ESA (CC BY 4.0)

It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.

Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It is thought that every galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its centre and that bigger galaxies host bigger ones, known as ultramassive black holes.

This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive. Most of the other black hole mass measurements are indirect and have quite large uncertainties, so we really don't know for sure which is biggest. However, we’ve got much more certainty about the mass of this black hole thanks to our new method.

Professor Thomas Collett, co-author
Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK.

Researchers detected the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole using a combination of gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics (the study of the motion of stars within galaxies and the speed and way they move around black holes).

The latter is seen as the gold standard for measuring black hole masses, but doesn't really work outside of the very nearby universe because galaxies appear too small on the sky to resolve the region where a supermassive or ultramassive black hole lies.

[Adding in gravitational lensing helped the team] push much further out into the universe. We detected the effect of the black hole in two ways – it is altering the path that light takes as it travels past the black hole and it is causing the stars in the inner regions of its host galaxy to move extremely quickly (almost 400 km/s). By combining these two measurements we can be completely confident that the black hole is real.

Professor Thomas Collett.

This discovery was made for a 'dormant' black hole – one that isn’t actively accreting material at the time of observation. Its detection relied purely on its immense gravitational pull and the effect it has on its surroundings. What is particularly exciting is that this method allows us to detect and measure the mass of these hidden ultramassive black holes across the universe, even when they are completely silent.

Carlos Melo-Carneiro, lead author.
Instituto de Física
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Another image of the Cosmic Horseshoe, but with the pair of images of a second background source highlighted.
The faint central image forms close to the black hole, which is what made the new discovery possible.

NASA/ESA/Tian Li (University of Portsmouth) (CC BY 4.0).

The Cosmic Horseshoe black hole is located a long way away from Earth, at a distance of some 5 billion light-years.

Typically, for such remote systems, black hole mass measurements are only possible when the black hole is active. But those accretion-based estimates often come with significant uncertainties. Our approach, combining strong lensing with stellar dynamics, offers a more direct and robust measurement, even for these distant systems.

Carlos Melo-Carneiro.

The discovery is significant because it will help astronomers understand the connection between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

We think the size of both is intimately linked, because when galaxies grow they can funnel matter down onto the central black hole. Some of this matter grows the black hole but lots of it shines away in an incredibly bright source called a quasar. These quasars dump huge amounts of energy into their host galaxies, which stops gas clouds condensing into new stars.

Professor Thomas Collett.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts a 4 million solar mass black hole. Currently it's not growing fast enough to blast out energy as a quasar but we know it has done in the past, and it may will do again in the future.

The Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way are moving together and are expected to merge in about 4.5 billion years, which is the most likely time for our supermassive black hole to become a quasar once again, the researchers say.

An interesting feature of the Cosmic Horseshoe system is that the host galaxy is a so-called fossil group.

Fossil groups are the end state of the most massive gravitationally bound structures in the universe, arising when they have collapsed down to a single extremely massive galaxy, with no bright companions.

It is likely that all of the supermassive black holes that were originally in the companion galaxies have also now merged to form the ultramassive black hole that we have detected. So we're seeing the end state of galaxy formation and the end state of black hole formation.

Professor Thomas Collett.

The discovery of the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole was somewhat of a serendipitous discovery. It came about as the researchers were studying the galaxy’s dark matter distribution in an attempt to learn more about the mysterious hypothetical substance.

Now that they’ve realised their new method works for black holes, they hope to use data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope to detect more supermassive black holes and their hosts to help understand how black holes stop galaxies forming stars.

Publication:

Carlos R Melo-Carneiro, Thomas E Collett, Lindsay J Oldham, Wolfgang Enzi, Cristina Furlanetto, Ana L Chies-Santos, Tian Li, Unveiling a 36 billion solar mass black hole at the centre of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 541, Issue 4, August 2025, Pages 2853–2871, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf1036

ABSTRACT
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are found at the centre of every massive galaxy, with their masses tightly connected to their host galaxies through a co-evolution over cosmic time. For massive ellipticals, the SMBH mass (\(\small ⁠M_\text{BH}\)⁠) strongly correlates with the host central stellar velocity dispersion (⁠\(\sigma_e\)⁠), via the relation. However, SMBH mass measurements have traditionally relied on central stellar dynamics in nearby galaxies (⁠\(\small z \lt 0.1\)⁠), limiting our ability to explore the SMBHs across cosmic time. In this work, we present a self-consistent analysis combining 2D stellar dynamics and lens modelling of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens system (⁠\(z_l = 0.44\)⁠), one of the most massive lens galaxies ever observed. Using MUSE integral-field spectroscopy and high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging, we simultaneously model the radial arc – sensible to the inner mass structure – with host stellar kinematics to constrain the galaxy’s central mass distribution and SMBH mass. Bayesian model comparison yields a \(\small 5\sigma\) detection of an ultramassive black hole with \(\small \log _{10}(M_\text{BH}/{\rm M}_{\odot }) = 10.56^{+0.07}_{-0.08} \pm (0.12)^\text{sys}\)⁠, consistent across various systematic tests. Our findings place the Cosmic Horseshoe \(\small 1.5\sigma\) above the \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relation, supporting an emerging trend observed in brightest cluster galaxies and other massive galaxies, which suggests a steeper \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relationship at the highest masses, potentially driven by a different co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. Future surveys will uncover more radial arcs, enabling the detection of SMBHs over a broader redshift and mass range. These discoveries will further refine our understanding of the \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relation and its evolution across cosmic time.

1 INTRODUCTION
Most massive galaxies are believed to host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their centre. More importantly, host galaxies and their SMBHs exhibit clear scaling relations, pointing to a co-evolution between the galaxy and the SMBH (Kormendy & Ho 2013). The SMBH mass (⁠\(\small M_{\text{BH}\)⁠) has been shown to correlate with various galaxy properties, such as the bulge luminosity (e.g. Magorrian et al. 1998; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Gültekin et al. 2009), stellar bulge mass (e.g. Laor 2001; McLure & Dunlop 2002), dark matter (DM) halo mass (e.g. Marasco et al. 2021; Powell et al. 2022), number of host’s globular clusters (e.g. Burkert & Tremaine 2010; Harris, Poole & Harris 2014), and stellar velocity dispersion (e.g. Gebhardt et al. 2000; Beifiori et al. 2009.1). Notably, the \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relation, which links SMBH mass to the effective stellar velocity dispersion of the host (⁠\(\small \sigma_e\)⁠), remains tight across various morphological types and SMBH masses (van den Bosch 2016). None the less, when SMBHs accrete mass from their neighbourhoods, they can act as active galactic nuclei (AGNs), injecting energy in the surrounding gas in a form of feedback. This feedback can be either positive, triggering star formation (Ishibashi & Fabian 2012; Silk 2013.1; Riffel et al. 2024), or negative quenching galaxy growth (e.g. Hopkins et al. 2006; Dubois et al. 2013.2; Costa-Souza et al. 2024.1).

It is expected that the most massive galaxies in the Universe, such as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), host the most massive SMBHs. Indeed, so-called ultramassive black holes (UMBHs; \(\small M_\text{BH} \ge 10^{10}M_\odot\)⁠) have been found in such systems (e.g. Hlavacek-Larrondo et al. 2012.1). Most of these UMBHs have been measured through spatially resolved dynamical modelling of stars and/or gas. For instance, the UMBH in Holm 15A at \(\small z=0.055\) \(\small M_\text{BH} = (4.0 \pm 0.80) \times 10^{10}M_\odot\) (⁠⁠; Mehrgan et al. 2019) and the UMBH in NGC 4889 at \(\small z = 0.021\) (⁠\(\small M_\text{BH} = (2.1 \pm 1.6) \times 10^{10}M_\odot\)⁠; McConnell et al. 2012.2) were both determined using stellar dynamical modelling. However, despite the success of this technique in yielding hundreds of SMBH mass measurements, the requirement for high-quality spatially resolved spectroscopy poses significant challenges for studies at increasing redshift (see e.g. Kormendy & Ho 2013, Suplemental Material S1).

None the less, the significance of these UMBHs lies in the fact that many of them deviate from the standard linear \(\small M_\text{BH} - \sigma_e\) relation (e.g. Kormendy & Ho 2013; den Bosch 2016). This suggests either a distinct evolutionary mechanism governing the growth of the largest galaxies and their SMBHs (McConnell et al. 2011), leading to a significantly steeper relation (Bogdán et al. 2018), or a potential decoupling between the SMBH and host galaxy co-evolution. Populating the high-mass end of the \(\small M_\text{BH} - \sigma_e\) relation, particularly through direct \(\small M_\text{BH}\) measurements, could help resolve this ongoing puzzle.

Recently, Nightingale et al. (2023), by modelling the gravitationally lensed radial image near the the Abell 1201 BCG (⁠\(\small z=0.169\)⁠), was able to measure the mass of its dormant SMBH as \(\small M_\text{BH} = (3.27 \pm 2.12) \times 10^{10}M_\odot\)⁠, therefore an UMBH. This provides a complementary approach to other high-z probes of SMBH mass, such as reverberation mapping (Blandford & McKee 1982; Bentz & Katz 2015) and AGN spectral fitting (Shen 2013.3). Unlike these methods, which require active accretion and depend on local Universe calibrations, the lensing technique offers a direct measurement independent of the SMBH’s accretion state.

In this paper, we analyse the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens system (Belokurov et al. 2007), where the lens galaxy is one of the most massive strong gravitational lenses known to date. The lens galaxy is an early-type galaxy (ETG) at redshift \(\small z_i = 0.44\)⁠, possibly part of a fossil group (Ponman et al. 1994), and is notable for lensing one of its sources into a nearly complete Einstein ring (the Horseshoe). Additionally, a second multiply imaged source forms a radial arc near the centre of the lens galaxy. Due to the radial image formed very close to the centre, the inner DM distribution of the Cosmic Horseshoe can be studied in detail, as done by Schuldt et al. (2019.1). By simultaneously modelling stellar kinematics from long-slit spectroscopy and the positions of the lensed sources, Schuldt et al. (2019.1) found that the DM halo is consistent with a Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW; Navarro, Frenk & White 1997) profile, with the DM fraction within the effective radius (⁠\(\small R_e\)⁠) estimated to be between 60 per cent and 70 per cent. Moreover, their models include a point mass at the galaxy’s centre, reaching values around \(\small \sim 10^{10} M_\odot\)⁠, which could represent an SMBH; however, they did not pursue further investigations into this possibility. Using new integral-field spectroscopic data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) and imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we conducted a systematic modelling of the Cosmic Horseshoe system to reassess the evidence for an SMBH at the heart of the lens galaxy. We performed a self-consistent analysis of both strong gravitational lensing (SGL) and stellar dynamics, which demonstrated that the presence of an SMBH is necessary to fit both data sets simultaneously. This paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we present the HST imaging data and MUSE observations, along with the kinematic maps used for the dynamical modelling. Section 3 briefly summarizes the lensing and dynamical modelling techniques, including the multiple-lens-plane formalism, the approximations adopted in this work, and the mass profile parametrization. In Section 4, we present the results from our fiducial model and alternatives models, which we use to address the systematics on the SMBH mass. In Section 5 we discuss our results and present other astrophysical implications. Finally, we summarize and conclude in Section 6. Unless otherwise, all parameter estimates are derived from the final sampling chain, with reported values representing the median of each parameter’s one-dimensional marginalized posterior distribution, with uncertainties corresponding to the \(\small 16^\text{th}\) and \(\small 84^\text{th}\) percentiles. Furthermore, throughout this paper, we adopt the cosmological parameters consistent with Planck Collaboration XIII (2016.1): \(\small \Omega _{\Lambda ,0} = 0.6911\)⁠, \(\small \Omega _{\text{m},0} = 0.3089\)⁠, \(\small \Omega _{\text{b},0} = 0.0486\)⁠, and \(\small H_0 = 67.74\) \(\small \text{km}\ \text{s}^{-1}\ \text{Mpc}^\text{-1}\).

Carlos R Melo-Carneiro, Thomas E Collett, Lindsay J Oldham, Wolfgang Enzi, Cristina Furlanetto, Ana L Chies-Santos, Tian Li, (2025)
Unveiling a 36 billion solar mass black hole at the centre of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens,
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 541(4), 2853–2871, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf1036

Copyright: © 2025 The Royal Astronomical Society.
Published by Oxford University Press. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The discovery and analysis of black holes, and phenomena such as Einstein rings, would have been utterly incomprehensible to the authors of the Bible. These were people with no concept of galaxies, the vastness of the universe, or even that Earth is a sphere orbiting the Sun. Their worldview was of a flat Earth covered by a solid dome, with the Sun, Moon, and “stars” fixed to it. The very idea of light being bent by gravity, or of objects so massive that even light cannot escape, would have been as far beyond their imagination as quantum mechanics itself.

When we compare their primitive cosmology with what modern science reveals—billions of galaxies, relativistic spacetime, the quantum-scale behaviour of matter, and black holes bending light into perfect circles—the contrast could not be more stark. The biblical description is not merely simplified; it is wrong on almost every measurable level. It has Earth at the centre, the stars as small lights, and the sky as a hard surface holding back water. Science, by contrast, uncovers a cosmos governed by consistent natural laws, tested and confirmed through observation and mathematics.

This is compelling evidence that an omniscient creator god did not write the Bible. If it had done, it could have contained truths about the nature of the cosmos that were unknown at the time, expressed in terms clear enough to be recognisable today—atoms, germs, the vastness of space, or even the basic structure of the solar system. Instead, what we find are the assumptions of scientifically illiterate Bronze Age people, drawing on local myths and imagination. The difference between their errors and the precision of modern astrophysics is not a matter of interpretation—it is a matter of fact.

Refuting Creationism - Ancestors Of Mammals Lived 40 Million Years Earlier Than We Thought.

Using a tooth, researchers have identified the oldest known species of docodont, the ancestor of mammals.

Illustration by Pedro Andrade

Docodontids in their natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT)

Nova FCT student identified a new ancestor of mammals from a two-millimeter tooth

A student palaeontologist, Sofia Patrocínio, from the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Lisbon (Nova FCT), has identified a fossil tooth as belonging to a docodontan – a group of mammaliform vertebrates considered close relatives and ancestors of true mammals. This discovery pushes back the known origin of this group by a further 40 million years.

This is the sort of find that often prompts headlines seemingly designed to play into the hands of anti-science groups such as creationists, with claims like *“The science books will need to be rewritten”* or *“Everything you thought you knew about evolution was wrong!”* These sensationalist lines risk creating the false impression that scientists are constantly realising they were “wrong all along”.

In reality – as in this case – what has happened is that a gap in our knowledge has been filled. Our understanding is now slightly more complete than before. Rather than overturning evolutionary theory, this discovery fits perfectly within it, supporting what was already known: there was a gradual transition from small reptiles to early mammals. The main uncertainty was *when* certain steps in that transition occurred.

Creationists who seize on such discoveries to claim scientists are forever changing their minds overlook an inconvenient detail – the timeline. Nearly all of these fossil finds involve organisms that lived hundreds of thousands, even millions of years before creationists believe the Earth and life began. If anything needs rewriting, it’s the creationist books that peddle disinformation to those willing to pay for material that reassures them their preconceived beliefs are correct – even when the evidence says otherwise.

Sofia Patrocínio and her colleagues have recently published their findings in the journal of the Palaeontological Association, Papers in Palaeontology. The discovery is also covered in a news article from Nova FCT, published in Almadense.

What Were Docodontans? Docodontans were small, extinct mammaliforms that lived during the Jurassic period, between about 201 and 145 million years ago. Although not true mammals, they were close relatives and part of the larger group from which mammals evolved.

They are best known from their distinctive teeth, which had complex cusps adapted for an omnivorous diet of insects, plants, and other small food sources. Fossils suggest docodontans were shrew-like in size and appearance, with some adapted to specialised habitats – including burrowing, climbing, and even semi-aquatic lifestyles.

The group is important to palaeontologists because their anatomy preserves key stages in the evolution from reptile-like synapsids to the first true mammals. Discoveries like the one by Sofia Patrocínio help refine our understanding of when and how early mammal traits emerged.

Nova FCT student identified a new ancestor of mammals from a two-millimeter tooth

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The fossil measures less than seven millimeters in total and is partially hidden in a rock. However, meticulous work has identified a new species that combines the name of a goddess with that of a constellation. The new species pushes back the emergence of this group of animals by 40 million years.

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After several years of researching a molar tooth from an animal that might resemble a mouse and several months until she was able to publish the scientific article, Sofia Patrocínio "closed" this cycle on Friday, June 13, 2025. The result presented in the scientific journal Papers in Palaeontology owes nothing to bad luck, but it does have its share of incidents, as the paleontologist told ALMADENSE.

"There's a funny story from high school: I had to do a project on paleontology and got a failing grade; I was so upset I said it wouldn't happen again," she says in a relaxed conversation, while admitting that she loves what she does. And she does a lot of things, even though many of them aren't even paid. "Paleontology isn't seen as a serious profession." Something she's determined to change.

Sofia Patrocínio is from Cartaxo and graduated in Environmental Education and Nature Tourism. It's been more than half a dozen years since she enrolled in the program, but the price of student housing elsewhere was unaffordable (then, as it is now) , and it was one of the factors that forced her to stay closer to home and enroll at the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém. After that, she interned at Dino Parque da Lourinhã and stayed on to work there.

It was impossible to remove the fossil from the rock due to the risk of damaging it. In the center of the image, the yellowish structure corresponds to the dentary (mandible), and the dark structure is the partially visible molar.

Photo: Sofia Patrocínio

“It was them [my colleagues at Dino Parque] who encouraged me to do a master's degree in Paleontology at Nova; they said I had a knack for it,” he says, referring to the course at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Lisbon (Nova FCT), which has a campus in the parish of Caparica, Almada.

In one of her master's degree courses, Vertebrate Paleontology, Sofia Patrocínio and her colleagues were challenged to prepare and describe fossils, some from the Lourinhã Museum collection and some from an excavation in Greenland. The then-master's student worked with needles and a microscope to remove the sediments still clinging to the fossil, which was less than seven millimeters long —even so, she was unable to free the entire piece, as we will see.

She then described the fossil in detail and attempted to identify its group and its phylogenetic relationships with other animal groups—in other words, she attempted to place the animal in its proper position on the tree of life. "It had similarities with several groups, but didn't seem to belong to any. It was most likely a new species," says the researcher. "I had so much study material that I could have continued [with the same topic] for my master's degree."

How does a tooth allow us to identify a new species?

The first step was to include the species in the order Docodonta, a group of mammaliforms—the evolutionary predecessors of mammals—with very distinctive molars. To put it simply, the molars were long and low, with a characteristic cusp pattern. (Cusps are the conical protrusions on molars, which we also have.) But this particular tooth had characteristics that didn't fit into any of the previously known genera or species within docodonts.

Docodont fossils are very rare, but there are fossils with entire jaws, which allowed comparison with the available material and ruled out a tooth with a small defect. "If it were just a change in the tooth's morphology, there might be doubt, but I counted five to seven differences," explains Sofia Patrocínio. Among these differences was a cusp facing the tongue.

While the tooth's original pattern allowed it to be classified as a new species, the layer in which it was found offers another new discovery. To determine the age of fossils, paleontologists "measure" the age of rocks found in the same layer. In this case, the fossil would have formed about 200 million years ago, during the transition between the Triassic and Jurassic periods (the period in which a wide variety of easily recognizable dinosaurs emerged). Even more interesting is that this species would have appeared 40 million years before the oldest known docodont species.

A new species at the transition between pre-docodont mammals and docodonts adds another piece to the puzzle of mammalian evolution, particularly the order Docodonta, which diversified and occupied various environments at the same time as large dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Furthermore, this fossil places the origin of docodonts in Greenland and Europe—connected before the continents separated into their current positions—rather than Russia and Asia as previously thought.

The layers of soil containing the fossils are like shelves in a bookcase, each corresponding to a period of time. By exploring each shelf as if reading the books stored there, the scientists were able to date the layer and the fossils—among them a new species of dinosaur, Plateosaurus trossingensis, identified by a fellow student in Sofia's master's program — and also describe the environment. The fossils were found in an ancient lake, with little oxygen in the water and which served as a passageway for many animals.

200 million years ago, when the 'Nujalikodon cassiopeiae' fossil is believed to have formed, what are now Greenland and Europe were connected, and also in contact with the continental plates of North America and Asia.

Adapted from: Patrocínio et al. (2025) Papers in Paleontology

A goddess tooth named after a constellation

Now 25, Sofia Patrocínio boasts the identification of a new species on her resume. "It's strange; it seems like it hasn't sunk in yet." Whoever discovers a new species can give it a name, naturally following the rules used by the scientific community. A species always has two Latin names (first the genus name, which functions almost like our surnames, and then the "proper name" that conveys the distinctive characteristic), as defined by the scientist Carlos Linnaeus in the mid-18th century.

This new docodont was named Nujalikodon cassiopeiae . Nujalik is the goddess of the earth hunt in Inuit mythology—the indigenous population of the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland—and "nujalikodon" means "Nujalik's tooth." The specific epithet cassiopeiae owes its name to the constellation Cassiopeia, whose five stars appear to form a W, like the cusps of the molar Sofia Patrocínio studied.

The 831 photographs taken by the scan allowed a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fossil measuring just seven millimeters.

Adapted from Patrocínio et al. (2025) Papers in Paleontology

Naming the species requires all the prior work of studying fossils, in this case a complete molar, the piece of bone that housed the tooth, and the broken roots of a second tooth. But a large portion of the fossil was not visible; it was still embedded within the rock, and removing it could irreparably damage the tooth. Furthermore, it was extremely small, the molar measuring only two millimeters. Therefore, a scan of the fossil was necessary—a kind of CT scan for very small objects—which was very difficult to achieve, says the researcher. "But without the scan, it was impossible to move forward, nor to submit the article for publication." Then, using the 831 photographs from the scan—as if the fossil had been cut into very thin slices—a three-dimensional model was created on the computer, allowing us to see the details hidden within the rock.

Sofia Patrocínio's work was supported by her advisors, Vicente Crespo, a paleontologist at Nova FCT, and Elsa Panciroli, a researcher at the National Museum of Scotland, and involved collaboration with other researchers. The work was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, as part of the GeoBioTec project.

Having completed this stage, the paleontologist hopes to continue studying the evolution of mammalian ancestors with a doctorate from the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon. This time, she will study the inner ear—but she will continue to observe bones and very small structures. In the meantime, she will participate in paleontological excavations, collaborate with a fossil database in Portugal, and, in the activities she organizes for Ciência Viva, try to spark children's interest in paleontology.

Publication:

Patrocínio, S., Panciroli, E., Rotatori, F.M., Mateus, O., Milàn, J., Clemmensen, L.B. and Crespo, V.D. (2025)
The oldest definitive docodontan from central East Greenland sheds light on the origin of the clade. Pap Palaeontol, 11: e70022. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.70022

ABSTRACT
The first mammaliaforms emerged in the Late Triassic, but their exact origins remain unclear due to the scarcity of fossils from this period. One of the earliest diverging mammaliaform groups, the order Docodonta, became unusually ecomorphologically diverse compared with other early mammals, and this may be connected to the possession of complex molar cusp morphology. The specimen described here, found in the Rhætelv Formation of the Kap Stewart Group (Rhaetian–Sinemurian) of central East Greenland, provides novel information on docodontan origins and evolution, as well as key biogeographic insights into early mammal dispersal. Nujalikodon cassiopeiae gen. et sp. nov. is the first mammaliaform found in the Rhætelv Formation, and is likely to be Early Jurassic (Hettangian) in age. Comprising an incomplete dentary with a single preserved molar, it was visualized using micro-computed tomography; the molar bears similarities to the putative early docodontan Delsatia, and docodontan Dobunnodon. Phylogenetic analysis places Nujalikodon cassiopeiae as a basal member of Docodonta or a close sister taxon, making it one of the oldest definitive docodontans and pushing the origin of the group back to at least the Early Jurassic. It provides insights into the development of docodontan dental complexity, a key factor in their ecological diversification during the Middle to Late Jurassic. Its presence in Greenland supports the hypothesis that docodontans originated in the region now comprising Europe and Greenland before dispersing across the rest of Laurasia.

Patrocínio, S., Panciroli, E., Rotatori, F.M., Mateus, O., Milàn, J., Clemmensen, L.B. and Crespo, V.D. (2025)
The oldest definitive docodontan from central East Greenland sheds light on the origin of the clade. Pap Palaeontol, 11: e70022. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.70022

© 2025 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This fossil tooth extends the known existence of docodontans by around 40 million years, placing them much earlier in the evolutionary timeline than previously documented. This is significant because:

• It strengthens the fossil record for the transition from reptile-like synapsids to early mammals, filling a critical gap rather than overturning existing theory.
• It confirms evolutionary predictions — that mammaliforms had already diversified long before the rise of true mammals, in line with phylogenetic models.
• It demonstrates the self-correcting nature of science — evidence leads to refinements in understanding, not wholesale abandonment of established frameworks. When the evidence changes, scientists change their minds, unlike theologians who try to change the evidence.

For creationism, the problem is twofold: the fossil is tens of millions of years older than the 6,000–10,000-year timeline central to young-Earth creationist belief, and docodontans are transitional, exhibiting a mosaic of traits bridging reptiles and mammals, exactly the kind of “missing links” creationists claim do not exist.

Rather than undermining evolution, this discovery is yet another piece of independent evidence that fits perfectly into its framework — and yet another reminder that creationist models fail when confronted with reality.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Evolution Of The Sweet Potato

‘Tanzania’ sweetpotato variety.

Credit: Benard Yada, National Crops Resources Research Institute
(NaCRRI), Uganda.

Decoding Sweetpotato DNA: New Research Reveals Surprising Ancestry - Boyce Thompson Institute

Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, creationists often claim that mutations cannot create new genetic information.

This argument rests on a deliberate misrepresentation of Shannon information theory, developed by Claude Shannon to optimise the transmission of information. Shannon’s theory equates information with entropy (a measure of uncertainty), not with “meaning”, and it draws on mathematical principles that can be related to thermodynamics. In thermodynamics, energy is conserved—neither created nor destroyed.

Creationists then assume, incorrectly, that this means the “information” in a genome cannot be created. They also tend to overlook the fact that, if their analogy with energy held true, it should also be impossible to destroy genetic information—yet they have no difficulty accepting the latter.

Malevolent Design - Has Creationism's Intellgent Designer Favoured a Goulish Parasite?

The jewel wasp, Nasonia vitripennis

Nasonia vitripennis female drilling into a host pupa (Calliphora vomitoria)

Wasps may hold the secret to slowing down the ageing process | News | University of Leicester

The jewel wasp, Nasonia vitripennis, is as striking as its name suggests — a tiny, glittering insect that, at first glance, might seem like a textbook example for creationists eager to claim “intelligent design.” Their reasoning, as usual, rests on little more than ignorant incredulity, a lack of understanding of evolution over deep time, and a confusion between the appearance of design and actual evidence for it.

But that enthusiasm evaporates when the facts crawl out. This insect’s life cycle is anything but beautiful — in fact, it’s the sort of thing that would make an all-loving creator god look more like a sadistic tinkerer. The jewel wasp is a parasitoid, laying its eggs inside the pupae of parasitic carrion flies such as blowflies. When the eggs hatch, the larvae devour the pupa from within, eventually emerging as adults, leaving behind only an empty shell.

It takes a particularly selective creationist to ignore this grisly reality and still point to the wasp’s jewel-like beauty as proof of divine craftsmanship, viewed through the narrow lens of human aesthetic tastes.

Now, researchers at the University of Leicester have discovered that — if creationist claims were taken seriously — these wasps have been uniquely blessed with the power to suspend ageing during their parasitic phase, a privilege denied to other organisms.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Create An 'Evolution Engine' Based on The Theory of Evolution

A creationists carefully checks the facts

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Scientists build an “evolution engine” to rapidly reprogram proteins | Scripps Research
In a groundbreaking stride for synthetic biology, researchers at Scripps Research have unveiled T7-ORACLE, a revolutionary platform that functions as an “evolution engine,” accelerating protein evolution thousands of times faster than in nature. Published in Science on 7 August 2025, this system enables continuous, hypermutated protein evolution inside E. coli, providing a transformative leap over traditional methods that require laborious, week-long cycles of DNA modification and testing (scripps.edu).

Unlike conventional directed evolution, which works in stop-start fashion, T7-ORACLE embeds an orthogonal T7 replisome — a virus-derived DNA replication machine—into bacteria. This replisome copies only a special plasmid carrying the gene to be evolved and does so at an error rate about 100,000 times higher than the host’s own DNA polymerase. With each bacterial division—roughly every 20 minutes—this system produces an enormous variety of mutant gene versions.

Selection is built into the process by linking the protein’s desired property to the bacterium’s survival or a measurable output. If the goal is to create an enzyme with a new function, the bacteria are grown under conditions where only those producing a beneficial version can thrive, allowing natural selection to occur at high speed. Alternatively, variants can be screened for specific traits—such as binding strength or fluorescence—and the best performers isolated. In both cases, the familiar Darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection drives the improvement, just as it does in nature.

Creationists often leap on examples like this to declare, “See! It took intelligence to make it work!” — missing the point entirely. The role of scientists here is like that of a farmer planting seeds: they set up the conditions, but they do not design each mutation or dictate which variants survive. Those outcomes arise from the same blind, automatic process of mutation and selection that occurs in nature. Building a racetrack does not create the laws of motion; it simply gives you a place to watch them in action.