Creationism Refuted - Humans Were Carving Birds Out Of Mammoth Ivory 30,000 years Before 'Creation Week'

Mammoth ivory carving of a bird, approximately 40,000 years old, from Hohle Fels, Germany

Photo: Ralf Ehmann

Figure of a bird from the Ice Age site of Hohle Fels, approximately 40,000 years old.

Credit: Ralf Ehmann

Two bird figurines found in World Heritage Site of Hohle Fels are declared „Find of the Year” | University of Tübingen

Young Earth creationists insist that Earth—and everything upon it—was created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, with the entire human population subsequently reduced to eight survivors of a global flood. Unfortunately for that mythology, archaeologists continue to uncover abundant evidence that humans were living, thinking and creating art tens of thousands of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, within cultures whose archaeological remains show no trace of having been interrupted by a planet-drowning flood.

The latest examples are two tiny bird figurines discovered in Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of south-western Germany. Carved from mammoth ivory approximately 40,000 years ago, during the Aurignacian period, they were recovered in 2025 from the cave’s well-documented archaeological sequence by a University of Tübingen team led by Professor Nicholas Conard.

Each figurine is scarcely larger than a thumbnail, yet both display remarkable anatomical and behavioural detail. One appears to represent a resting or possibly brooding bird, with its head drawn close to its body and its legs tucked beneath it. The other has its wings spread and its neck extended, perhaps depicting a bird in flight, landing, threatening a rival or displaying during courtship. At just two centimetres long and weighing about 0.7 grams, the latter is the smallest known piece of Ice Age figurative art from the Swabian Jura World Heritage region.

Refuting Creationism - Ceremonial Rituals In An Australian Cave - 15,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago, Cloggs Cave, Victoria, Australia.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Microscopic plant remains reveal 25,000 years of GunaiKurnai rituals deep in a Victorian cave

A point I have made before in this blog is that the ignorance of the Bible’s authors is revealed as clearly by what they omitted as by what they included. When examined in the light of modern science, many of their claims turn out to be wrong, showing that they filled gaps in their knowledge with stories that reflected the prevailing superstitions of their culture. Meanwhile, the omissions reveal just how narrow their geographical and intellectual horizons were.

There is no unmistakable fact in the Bible that could not have been known, inferred or imagined by people living in the ancient Near East when its various books were written. There is no knowledge that required revelation from an omniscient being and no awareness of vast regions, peoples or periods of history lying beyond the experience of its human authors.

That is entirely understandable if the Bible is a collection of human writings. It is much more difficult to explain if its ultimate author was an omniscient god. Such an author would not have shared the cosmological limitations of ancient people or presented the world in the familiar ancient Near Eastern form found in Genesis: primordial waters divided by a firmament, dry land beneath it, and the Sun, Moon and stars placed in that firmament as lights. Whatever ingenious reinterpretations modern apologists may retrofit to the text, there is nothing in it that anticipates the real structure, age or scale of the Universe.

Nor is there any hint that people were already living on the other side of the planet. Archaeological evidence from Madjedbebe in northern Australia indicates human occupation by about 65,000 years ago. The Bible’s authors knew nothing of Australia, its First Peoples or the tens of thousands of years of human history that had already elapsed before the supposed events of Genesis.

What is perhaps more surprising is that educated adults today can still imagine that the Genesis creation myth is an accurate and inerrant account of history, despite its demonstrable errors and enormous omissions. The text contains no Australia, no Americas, no Pacific peoples and no conception of the deep human past—only the restricted world known to its authors, projected onto the entire planet.

Augustine of Hippo provides an illuminating example of how treating Scripture as historical fact could obstruct an otherwise rational consideration of the evidence. Contrary to a common misconception, Augustine did not insist that Earth was flat. By his time, its spherical shape had been understood by educated Greeks and Romans for centuries, and Augustine was prepared to concede that it might be demonstrated scientifically.

What he could not accept was that the far side of a spherical Earth might be inhabited, because that appeared irreconcilable with the biblical claim that every human descended from a single original man—and, after the supposed global flood, from Noah and his family. In De Civitate Dei, he wrote:

Refuting Creationism - How Storms Created A Dinosaur Fossil Site - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Graphical abstract

Fanti, Federico; Consorti, Lorenzo; Muscioni, Marco; et al (2026) (CC BY 4.0)

Tethyshadros insularis and crocodilians struggle against a violent monsoon storm.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site

Young-Earth creationists are fond of pointing out that a single flood or storm can deposit a layer of sediment very quickly, as though this somehow proves that the entire geological record could have been produced during the mythical year-long flood described in Genesis. But the speed with which an individual layer forms tells us nothing about the intervals between successive layers. When those layers contain regular, measurable cycles produced by processes operating daily, fortnightly and seasonally, they become a record of elapsed time—and that time cannot simply be waved away.

An article in The Conversation by palaeontologist Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of University College London describes just such a record. It concerns the Villaggio del Pescatore fossil site near Trieste, north-eastern Italy, where dinosaurs, crocodilians, fish, shrimps, plants and other organisms were preserved with exceptional detail about 80 million years ago.

Chiarenza and his colleagues, led jointly with Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna, have published their findings in the journal Global and Planetary Change. Their evidence shows that the site was not, as previously proposed, a quiet lake or sinkhole. It was a tropical tidal flat on the edge of an ancient sea, repeatedly affected by powerful monsoon floods and tropical cyclones.

The fossil-bearing limestone consists of metre-thick packages containing thousands of discrete, paper-thin light and dark layers. These had previously been interpreted as annual deposits, or varves. However, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scanning, microscopic and geochemical analyses, and statistical analysis of the repeating patterns revealed something still more remarkable: the layers are tidal microcouplets, laid down under a semidiurnal tidal regime—two tidal cycles each day.

Moreover, variations in the thickness of the layers follow the familiar fortnightly alternation between spring and neap tides. The rocks therefore contain not merely a succession of vaguely similar bands, but an ordered astronomical rhythm produced by the interaction of Earth’s rotation with the orbit of the Moon. By counting and analysing those layers, the researchers calculated that the fossil-bearing succession accumulated over approximately 40 years. In other words, the rock preserves an almost day-by-day record extending across four decades.

That presents creationists with a problem that cannot be dismissed by claiming that “floods can deposit sediment rapidly”. Of course they can; that is precisely what some of the layers record. But a single flood cannot manufacture 40 years’ worth of successive twice-daily tidal deposits, arranged in the correct fortnightly spring–neap pattern. Still less can the supposed year-long biblical flood accommodate a geological sequence that records some 40 years of tides within one small part of a vastly larger, 80-million-year-old succession.

Refuting Creationism - The Unbroken History of China

Carving stone at Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

The landscape of Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

New DNA Study Unlocks Origins, Social Structure of Neolithic Shimao Civilization----Chinese Academy of Sciences

In my last blog post, I pointed out that ancient Egypt’s archaeological and written record extends continuously from long before the date young-Earth creationists assign to Noah’s Flood, through that supposed catastrophe and into biblical times. Nowhere is there any sign that Egypt was destroyed by a global flood and subsequently repopulated by migrants from Mesopotamia. I also showed that the biblical writers who set stories in Egypt possessed only a tenuous understanding of its real history and culture.

Ancient China presents creationists with much the same problem. Its archaeological record contains long regional sequences extending across the supposed date of the Flood, with local populations, cultures and economies continuing to develop. If every human outside Noah’s immediate family had been exterminated, the existing peoples of East Asia should disappear from the record and be replaced by a rapidly expanding population of recent Mesopotamian origin. That is not what archaeology shows—and ancient DNA now provides an especially clear test of the claim.

The evidence comes from a paper published in Nature in November 2025 by an international team led by Professor Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with researchers from several other Chinese institutions.

The team analysed genome-wide data from 169 ancient individuals recovered from Shimao and surrounding settlements in northern China. Population analyses were conducted using 144 unrelated individuals, while the remaining close relatives enabled the researchers to reconstruct pedigrees extending across as many as four generations.

Shimao, in northern Shaanxi Province, was one of the largest fortified settlements in Late Neolithic China. Occupied from approximately 2300 to 1800 BCE, it covered about four square kilometres and contained massive stone walls, separate inner and outer enclosures, specialised craft production, elite cemeteries and unmistakable evidence of a highly stratified society. Its occupation therefore began at about the very time when, according to the conventional young-Earth creationist chronology, the world should have been struggling to recover from a global extermination and repopulation by Noah’s immediate descendants.

Instead, the genomes showed that the people associated with Shimao were predominantly descended from populations already living in northern Shaanxi at least 1,000 years earlier. Those earlier inhabitants were associated with the Yangshao cultural tradition of the Yellow River’s Loess Plateau. The researchers found regional genetic continuity from the Middle to the Late Neolithic—continuity extending from before the supposed Flood into the centuries following it.

This was not a completely isolated or genetically static population. The researchers detected continuing contact with Yumin-related people from Inner Mongolia, close connections with the contemporary Taosi population farther south, and some ancestry from southern East Asian populations, possibly associated with the northward spread of rice cultivation. These were the ordinary movements, exchanges and intermarriages expected among neighbouring prehistoric farming and pastoral communities. They did not interrupt the dominant local ancestry, and there was no sign of wholesale population replacement by descendants of a family recently arrived from Mesopotamia.

The genetic evidence also revealed much about the organisation of Shimao society. Pedigrees reconstructed from elite burials indicated a predominantly patrilineal system in which status and wealth commonly passed from high-ranking men to their sons. Male members of these lineages showed relatively little diversity in their Y-chromosome ancestry, whereas the women displayed much greater mitochondrial diversity. This is consistent with women frequently marrying into communities dominated by established male lineages, although the evidence for strictly patrilocal residence remains suggestive rather than conclusive.

The study also uncovered a possible sex-related pattern in Shimao’s practice of human sacrifice. Nine of the ten sampled victims buried beneath the East Gate were male, contradicting earlier identifications based on skeletal anatomy. In contrast, most sampled sacrificial victims accompanying elite burials were female: six of seven at Hanjiagedan and fourteen of nineteen at Huangchengtai. This suggests that male and female victims may have been selected for different rituals conducted in different places, although the researchers caution that the number of genetically sexed victims remains too small to establish the pattern conclusively.

Creationism Refuted - The Unbroken History Of Egypt

Egyptian Middle Kingdom princesses at archery practice

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Warrior princesses of ancient Egypt? Skeletons show women used the weapons buried with them

The writers and editors who composed the Pentateuch clearly possessed some knowledge of Egypt. It was, after all, a powerful neighbouring civilisation with which the peoples of the Levant had interacted for centuries. But a sprinkling of Egyptian names, loanwords and geographical details does not turn a theological story into an accurate historical account. When the biblical narratives are compared with Egyptian records, chronology and archaeology, Egypt often appears less as a real country than as an exotic stage on which the authors could set their morality tales.

The biblical use of the word ‘Pharaoh’ illustrates the problem, although not for the reason sometimes claimed. ‘Pharaoh’ is not a Hebrew expression meaning ‘owner of an estate’. The Hebrew par‘ō was borrowed from the ancient Egyptian pr-ꜥꜣ, meaning ‘Great House’. It originally referred to the royal palace and only during the New Kingdom came to be used for the king himself. Its use as the personal designation of a ruler in Genesis, whose supposed events are conventionally placed centuries earlier, is therefore probably anachronistic.

More revealingly, the biblical authors never identify the rulers in the Joseph or Exodus stories by any of their regnal names. Egyptian kings possessed elaborate formal titles and names, yet the Bible gives us only an anonymous ‘Pharaoh’. This makes it impossible to place either story securely within Egyptian chronology and contrasts sharply with the detailed records left by the Egyptians themselves.

There is likewise no independent evidence for an Exodus on anything resembling the scale described in the Bible. No Egyptian record mentions ten devastating plagues, the death of the firstborn, the destruction of a substantial chariot force or the sudden flight of an enormous enslaved population. Egyptian royal inscriptions were selective and rarely advertised defeats, so their silence alone would not be conclusive. However, there is also no corresponding demographic, economic or archaeological disruption in Egypt, and no material trace in Sinai of the immense population demanded by a strictly literal reading of the story.

The narrative also contains striking internal difficulties. Exodus 9 describes a pestilence affecting the Egyptian livestock in the fields—including horses—and then declares that ‘all the livestock of the Egyptians died’. Yet the same chapter subsequently refers to more Egyptian livestock, while Exodus 14 has Pharaoh assembling 600 chosen chariots, together with his other chariots, all of which would have required teams of surviving horses. Apologists can invent unmentioned groups of sheltered or unaffected animals, but that is an attempt to repair the story, not a literal reading of what it says.

Nor is the geography as straightforward as the familiar Sunday-school version suggests. The Hebrew Yam Suph, traditionally translated as the Red Sea, more probably means the ‘Sea of Reeds’, and its intended location remains uncertain. Moreover, at the dates commonly proposed for an Exodus, Egypt maintained forts, roads and mining operations in Sinai and exercised imperial control over much of Canaan. Even after leaving Egypt proper, the Israelites would not necessarily have escaped Egyptian power.

Exodus 12:37 gives a figure of about 600,000 adult men, besides women and children. Read literally, that implies a total population of perhaps two or three million people, together with their animals. It is absurd to imagine such a population living and travelling in Sinai for 40 years without leaving campsites, hearths, tools, pottery, animal bones, human burials or any other archaeological footprint remotely commensurate with its supposed size.

An even greater problem for biblical literalists is the continuous archaeological record of Egypt itself. Young-Earth creationist chronologies commonly place their global Flood somewhere around the middle of the third millennium BCE, by which time Egypt had already been a unified state for centuries and the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom had been built. Egyptian society certainly underwent political and economic changes, but there is no point at which its entire population disappears and is replaced by descendants of eight survivors from Mesopotamia.

Nor is there a synchronous horizon of catastrophic erosion, inundation, mass death and repopulation throughout Egypt—or anywhere else—that could represent a global Flood. Instead, archaeologists find settlements, tombs, temples, administrative records and evolving cultural traditions extending through and beyond the period in which the Flood supposedly occurred. It is a vast body of mutually consistent evidence that simply could not exist in its present form if the biblical story were literal history.

We Can Tell The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Not Just By What's In It, But By What Isn't

Araucaria forest at sunrise.

Photo by Douglas Scortegagna (CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons)

Araucaria augustifolia (Brazilian pine)

Brazil’s highland forest has been shaped by climate change and Indigenous people for 6,000 years

One of the clearest indications that the Bible was written by people with a severely limited knowledge of the world is, in addition to the factual errors in it, such as Earth being flat with a dome over it, there is the evidence of what is not in it. Its authors wrote as though the small part of the ancient Near East familiar to them was effectively the whole inhabited Earth, so there is nothing in the Bible from outside a small area around the Middle East. They had no conception of a southern hemisphere, knew nothing of continents such as South America, and had no awareness of the peoples, cultures and complex histories that had existed there for thousands of years.

That parochial view of the world is exposed every time archaeologists and palaeoecologists reconstruct the history of regions the Bible’s authors did not even know existed. Far from being a divinely inspired account of the whole planet, the Bible reflects the geographical horizons and cultural assumptions of the scientifically illiterate people who composed it.

The latest example comes from the cold highlands of southern Brazil, where an international team of researchers has reconstructed how climate, fire and Indigenous land management shaped the distinctive mosaic of Araucaria forest and campos grassland during the past 6,000 years. The research is described by Oliver J. Wilson, a lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Lincoln, in an article in The Conversation and was published in Scientific Reports.

The researchers combined several independent sources of evidence: pollen and microscopic charcoal preserved in continuously accumulating bog sediments, radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence, a rainfall record preserved in a cave speleothem, and ecological models showing how the forest should have responded to climatic change. Together, these sources reveal a detailed history of gradual climatic shifts, changing fire regimes, forest expansion and human modification of the landscape.

Creationism Refuted - Giant Kangaroos In New Guinea - 1,500 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Impression of Protemnodon tumbuna

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Giant kangaroos survived until 6,500 years ago on the New Guinea coast.

It is probably fair to say that no branch of science is a friend of creationism. That is presumably why creationists devote so much time and effort to trying to discredit science—often without the slightest appreciation of the irony of using computers and the Internet, both products of science and engineering, to tell the world that science does not work. Yet their attitude towards science is not merely hostile but opportunistic: whenever they encounter a scientific finding that they think can be misrepresented as supporting creationism, they suddenly become jubilant champions of ‘the evidence’.

Archaeology is one of the most persistent threats to literalist creationism. Far from confirming the biblical narrative, it repeatedly uncovers evidence of human cultures, environmental changes and extinct animals extending far beyond the few thousand years permitted by Young Earth Creationism. Nor does archaeology stand alone. Its findings repeatedly converge with those of genetics, palaeontology, geology and climatology to produce the same coherent history—a history in which neither a recent magical creation nor a global genocidal flood leaves the slightest trace.

True to form, a recently published paper in the journal npj Biodiversity, by an Australian-based team of archaeologists and palaeontologists, presents evidence from New Guinea that simply could not exist if the biblical narratives of a magical creation a few thousand years ago, followed by a global flood about 4,300 years ago, bore any resemblance to reality. The evidence indicates that a large extinct kangaroo relative—probably Protemnodon tumbuna—survived on the northern coast of New Guinea until the Middle Holocene, perhaps as recently as about 6,500 years ago.

This was tens of thousands of years after every known species of Protemnodon had disappeared from Australia, where the genus is thought to have become extinct by about 41,000 years ago, along with most of the continent’s other megafauna.

Protemnodon tumbuna was a stocky, muscular forest-dwelling kangaroo weighing an estimated 50–90 kilograms—roughly comparable in size to a modern red kangaroo. Unlike modern large kangaroos, however, it was probably predominantly quadrupedal, using its powerful forelimbs to move through dense forest and hopping only inefficiently and for short distances, if at all. It was one of seven currently recognised species of Protemnodon known collectively from Australia and New Guinea.

Refuting Creationism - Population Collapse And Migration in Neolithic Europe - And No Evidence Of A Genocidal Flood

The researchers have conducted DNA analyses of the skeletons from a burial site like this one in France and found traces of several different diseases.

Photo: Getty Images / Michal Boubin

Stone age population collapse revealed by DNA study in France – University of Copenhagen

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a large international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, reports evidence that simply should not exist if the Bible creation myth, and its later global genocidal flood myth, had any basis in reality. The evidence shows a significant population collapse among Neolithic farming communities in what is now northern France about 5,000 years ago, followed by migration into the depopulated area by people with strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The study is based on ancient DNA from 132 individuals buried in the allée sépulcrale at Bury, a large megalithic tomb about 50 kilometres north of Paris. The site was used during two distinct burial phases, separated by a hiatus associated with the wider Neolithic decline around 3000 BC. The researchers found that the people buried before and after this decline were not simply later descendants of the same local population, but belonged to largely discontinuous genetic groups. In other words, this was not merely a change in burial custom; it was a major population turnover.

The problems this presents for creationism are multiple. First, there is the evidence of established farming populations in northern Europe at a time when, according to Young Earth Creationist chronology, the world had only recently been magicked into existence. Secondly, there is the embarrassing survival of archaeological and genetic evidence which, under the same mythology, should either have been destroyed in a global flood a few centuries later, or buried beneath a distinctive, worldwide layer of fossil-bearing flood silt — a layer which is conspicuous by its absence. Thirdly, there is the evidence that the human population of Europe had already diversified into regionally distinct genetic populations by about 3000 BC, with enough structure for ancient DNA to distinguish northern French and German-like Neolithic farmers from later migrants with strong southern French and Iberian affinities.

None of this, of course, will cause creationists to reconsider the mythology. We can confidently predict that it will instead be treated as another test of faith: one more opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their determination never to let evidence change their minds. In creationist apologetics, refusal to learn is often mistaken for intellectual victory. The more compelling the evidence, the greater the achievement in ignoring it.

The reason for the population decline is not yet clear. The human remains contained genetic traces of pathogens, including the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the louse-borne relapsing fever bacterium, Borrelia recurrentis, but the evidence does not support plague as the sole cause of the collapse. The more likely explanation is a combination of disease, environmental stress, demographic disruption and social breakdown. Earlier burials contained multiple generations from the same extended families, suggesting stable, kin-based communities. Later burials were more selective and were dominated by a single male lineage, indicating a marked change in social organisation after the population turnover.

This adds to the growing picture of the so-called Neolithic decline as a widespread phenomenon affecting much of northern and western Europe, not just Scandinavia and northern Germany. It also offers a plausible explanation for the abrupt disappearance of megalithic tomb-building and other monumental traditions across parts of Europe at about the same time. The people who built those monuments did not merely change their minds about architecture; in places such as the Paris Basin, the population itself appears to have collapsed and been replaced.

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Living In A West African Rain Forest 140,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life in a West African rain forest 150,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago | News | The University of Sheffield

Stone Tool

Credit: Jimbob Blinkorn, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

According to the findings of an international team led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, with contributions from the University of Sheffield, published in February 2025 in Nature, humans were living in the wet tropical forests of what is now Côte d’Ivoire about 150,000 years ago — more than 140,000 years before creationists imagine their mythical “Creation Week”, when they believe the single ancestral couple of all modern humans was created by magic somewhere in the Middle East.

The date itself is no surprise to anyone who understands the real evolutionary history of our species. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens had emerged in Africa by about 300,000 years ago, and the evidence increasingly points not to a single cradle, but to a pan-African process involving populations adapted to different regions and environments. What is striking about this discovery is not that humans were present in Africa 150,000 years ago, but that they were living in a tropical rainforest — an environment long assumed to have played only a minor, late role in human evolution.

That older assumption fitted neatly with the simplified “savannah hypothesis”, in which the ancestors of humans were thought to have diverged from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos as climatic change fragmented African forests and created more open grassland and woodland habitats. In that view, rainforest was more of a barrier than a formative environment. But the emerging picture is far more interesting: early H. sapiens were not simply creatures of open savannahs, coasts or grasslands, but members of a flexible, adaptable species able to exploit a wide range of African habitats long before the later dispersals into Eurasia.

Part of the reason rainforest environments have been under-represented in accounts of human evolution is that they are poor places for preserving bones, artefacts and organic remains. Acidic soils, heavy rainfall, dense vegetation and rapid biological decay all work against the survival of the archaeological record. That makes the Bété I site in southern Côte d’Ivoire especially important. Using optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods, the researchers constrained the onset of human occupation there to around 150 ka. Plant-wax biomarkers, stable isotope data, phytoliths and pollen from the associated sediments then showed that the environment at the time was wet tropical forest.

This pushes the earliest known secure evidence of human occupation of a rainforest environment back by about 80,000 years. It also suggests that tropical forests were not late, marginal or forbidding habitats into which modern humans only ventured after acquiring some special new cultural trick, but part of the ecological range within which H. sapiens was already living during the Middle Pleistocene.

The finding was made possible because modern dating and environmental reconstruction techniques could be applied to sediments associated with stone tools first found at the site in the 1980s. In other words, once again, patient science has extracted a coherent, evidence-based history from the ground — a history that would not exist at all if there had been a recent global genocidal flood churning the world’s sediments into the chaotic mess required by creationist mythology.

Creationism Refuted - Our Ancestors Lived In North America - 56 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

Ai-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

At times, it seems almost cruel to keep reminding creationists that another day, another week and another month have passed, and still there is no hint that biomedical scientists are about to abandon evidence-based evolutionary biology and adopt magic-based creationism as a better explanation of the facts. And yet here we are again: another paper, another article, and another example of evolution providing the rational framework for interpreting the evidence.

And, to rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence deals with events around 56 million years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. As though to refute yet another creationist myth — that scientists are only allowed to publish papers that confirm mainstream scientific orthodoxy — the findings, published by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and colleagues in the mainstream journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), challenge the long-standing assumption that the primate lineage originated in warm tropical forests.

The study maps the likely geographic origins of our primate ancestors and reconstructs the historical climate at those locations. Its conclusion is surprising: early primates appear to have lived, dispersed and diversified through cold, arid and temperate regions, not primarily in the tropics. Their later colonisation of tropical regions took several million years and seems to have been driven more by local changes between dry and wet climates than by global warming itself.

One useful example is the tiny early primate Teilhardina, a small, tree-dwelling mammal known from fossils around 56 million years old — roughly 10 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that Teilhardina had nails rather than claws, helping it grasp branches and handle food, a characteristic associated with primates. Species of this early primate group appear in the fossil record of North America and then dispersed rapidly across what are now Europe and China.

An article explaining the finding and its significance for understanding our evolutionary origins was published in The Conversation by Jason Gilchrist, a lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Old Dead Gods - How Gods Only Exist In The Minds Of Their Believers

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge, partly covered by two fallen sarsens

The Alter Stone

Study details epic transportation of Stonehenge stone across ancient Britain | Curtin University

A paper published in June 2026 in Journal of Quaternary Science is a reminder that no one remembers the old dead gods, and no one mourns their passing, although they, like today’s god or gods, were real in the minds of their followers and provided their priesthoods and ruling elites with an excuse for wielding considerable unelected and unaccountable power. The paper reports on the likely origin and possible mode of transport of the so-called Altar Stone of Stonehenge — a feat which speaks of the political and social power needed to command, organise and supply a large cohort of labourers, and perhaps to exercise that power over a considerable part of the island of Great Britain.

I have written several times about the old dead gods, particularly those of Wiltshire, who inspired the building of such enduring monuments as Silbury Hill, Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. These immense civil engineering projects suggest a population large enough to support a substantial, non-productive labour force, and a ruling elite able to command and supply the workers. In turn, that suggests a unifying culture, almost certainly religious, which regarded these works as worthwhile, or even necessary, perhaps to placate or please a god or pantheon of gods and so ensure that the crops succeeded, the seasons returned in their proper order, and tomorrow was much like today, free from natural disasters, plagues and pestilence.

Of course, we do not now even know the names of these gods, let alone what their followers believed they did, but we can be fairly sure that their followers believed they needed them and worked hard to keep them ‘on side’. The extraordinary lengths to which people went, in moving stones, raising earthworks and reshaping the landscape, were probably acts of collective devotion, obligation and power, expressed in stone and soil. Given the evidence of ancient trackways converging on Salisbury Plain, the area was almost certainly one of widespread ceremonial and religious significance, perhaps known far beyond Wiltshire.

Ask those people what evidence they had for their god or gods, and they would almost certainly have given much the same ‘reasons’ as today’s theists: ‘Look at the trees!’, ‘The evidence is all around you’, ‘Who makes the sun rise?’, ‘Who sends diseases to punish us?’, and so on. The logic was the same; only the names of the gods have changed. And now even those names have gone.

One alternative explanation for the appearance of the Altar Stone at Stonehenge is that it was transported naturally by a glacier. However, analysis of its mineral grains, particularly its detrital zircon age signature, points to the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland as its most likely broad source region. The researchers reason that, although some Ice Age transport by glaciers may have been possible, especially towards the North Sea and Dogger Bank, there was no viable glacial pathway capable of carrying the stone all the way to Salisbury Plain. And even if a glacier had moved it as far as Dogger Bank, the timing creates another difficulty: by the time Stonehenge was constructed, Doggerland had already been inundated by rising post-glacial sea levels.

The researchers therefore conclude that, although glacial transport could have played some part in the stone’s earlier history, it cannot explain its final arrival at Stonehenge. Human transport remains the most likely explanation for that last, extraordinary stage of the journey. Perhaps the stone had some special cultural or religious significance, rather like the later Stone of Scone, which made it seem worth the considerable effort and manpower involved. Although the authors do not explore the motives of those who moved it, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the motive was religious or ceremonial — the same kind of motive that later drove people to build cathedrals, mosques, monasteries and temples across Europe and western Asia.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - Evidence That wouldn't Be there if The Bible Myths Were True

Examples of different treatments and states of preservation of human remains at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby.

Furholt M, et al (2026).

Drone footage of the excavation site.

© Nils Müller-Scheeßel

Headless skeletons offer new insights into farming societies 7,000 years ago

A problem for biblical literalist creationists is that they are wedded to the absurd and demonstrably false notion that the Bible is a literal account of real history, including a catastrophic, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago. Such a flood would have left a tell-tale, globally recognisable layer of flood sediment containing the jumbled remains of the animals and plants it had killed. It would also have destroyed, displaced or buried earlier human settlements beneath one unmistakable flood horizon.

This, of course, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. The predicted global layer of flood silt is not there, and the archaeological record continues, uninterrupted, through the very period in which creationists need their flood to have occurred. Practically every archaeological find older than the various creationist dates for Noah's Flood — from the pyramids at Giza to the less spectacular but more numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age burial grounds, field systems, settlements, tools and artefacts that litter the African and Eurasian landscape — should not be where it is, least of all in the Middle East, the supposed epicentre of the alleged catastrophe.

And yet archaeologists are regularly digging up evidence of human activity that long predates the creationist timescale. A recent example is the grim, 7,000-year-old evidence of headless human bodies at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby in Slovakia, reported in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. The refutation of creationist mythology is, of course, entirely incidental. The archaeological question is what this extraordinary find tells us about an Early Neolithic farming society. The indications so far are that the heads were not removed by violent decapitation as a form of execution — which might have suggested a society in crisis or conflict — but were skilfully removed around the time of death. That points instead to some form of social, ritual or funerary practice, although the precise meaning of that practice remains uncertain.

The site at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby comprises more than 300 house outlines arranged in three neighbourhoods, with up to 80 buildings inhabited at the same time. The settlement existed for several centuries, approximately between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood was enclosed by a ditch, probably marking a boundary, and it was in or around this ditch, especially near the entrance to the settlement, that archaeologists found the remains of at least 78 individuals. Of these, 77 lacked heads, the single exception being a child whose skull was still present.

Creationism Refuted - British Fallow Deer Have LOST Genetic Diversity - Over The Last 120,000 Years

Fallow deer, Dama dama

Photo credit: Jiří Nedorost.,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fallow deer

Photo credit: Memurubu, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UP News - University of Potsdam

A paper just published in iScience should, if they were aware of it, at least cause an honest creationist to question some basic assumptions. It reports that modern European fallow deer, Dama dama, retain only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in their Ice Age ancestors. This finding is based on ancient DNA recovered from the fossilised remains of ten, approximately 120,000-year-old fallow deer from Neumark-Nord in Germany, analysed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Creationism continues to take a battering in the world of real science, where yet another paper quite incidentally refutes several of its basic dogmas. Creationists, who are notoriously reluctant to read serious science and would probably struggle to understand it if they did, will no doubt remain blissfully unaware of this constant refutation of their core superstitions.

To ensure that ignorance is maintained, creationist disinformation sites expend considerable effort in spreading distrust of serious science amongst their followers. What cult leader would want his followers reading anything that exposes his claims as bogus?

However, ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and the facts this paper reveals go to the heart of creationist mythology. Firstly, this evidence should not exist at all if the Bible creation myth were real history: a magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global genocide, would leave no room for a 120,000-year-old population of fallow deer preserved in an Eemian lake environment. Secondly, it undermines the creationist parody of evolution that they so often attack: the false claim that evolution must always mean increasing complexity, and that any loss of genetic information is invariably fatal.

The reduced genetic diversity of modern fallow deer is a clear example of evolution involving a loss of genetic variation within a population. So far as individual deer are concerned, there need be no immediate reduction in fitness; the problem comes when a population has less capacity to respond to environmental change, disease, or other selective pressures, and may then be more vulnerable to extinction. Evolution, of course, has no plan. Unlike intelligent design, or even guided evolution, it cannot foresee future conditions and prepare a species for them. A species can be driven towards extinction by the simple operation of mindless natural processes.

Refuting Creation - With Goethe's 40-Million-Year-Old Ant

Amber piece 1552.b showing bioinclusions. Arrow in a (top): inclusion of †Ctenobethylus goepperti; arrow in b (bottom): inclusion of the Sciaridae. Scale bar 5 mm.

Boudinot, B.E., Bock, B.L., Tröger, D. et al. (2026)

Exceptionally Well-Preserved Ant in Goethe’s Amber | Uni Jena

Some years ago, while staying for a few days in Berlin in a hotel just off Goethestraße, I made the mistake of telling a taxi driver that our hotel was just off “Go-eth Straße”. It took several minutes and a map to sort out the confusion.

“Nein! Goethe-Straße!” he laughed. Only then did I realise that “Go-eth” and “Goethe” were not two different German philosophers.

“Ach ja! Danke! Goethe! Ich bin ein Engländer!” I explained, in my best German.

“Ja! Is better we speak English,” he replied.

Goethestraße — Goethe Street — is, of course, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the German writer, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also an administrator, scientist, geologist, botanist and philosopher. As a naturalist and collector, he left behind an extensive geological and mineralogical collection, including 40 pieces of Baltic amber, which have now been closely examined by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena — appropriately enough, since Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller were friends.

What they found was the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports, published in January 2026. It is not good news for creationists, since it concerns an approximately 40-million-year-old ant, preserved in exquisite detail and now visible using modern imaging techniques such as synchrotron micro-computed tomography. In addition to the ant, the scientists also found a fungus gnat and a blackfly in Goethe’s amber.

It is unlikely that Goethe knew these creatures were preserved in his amber, since the pieces are unpolished and the contents are barely visible to the untrained eye. He certainly could not have known that the amber was tens of millions of years old. Had he known, we can only speculate how that knowledge might have affected his view of nature, time and human origins. His famous work, Faust, draws deeply on Christian motifs, including the story of a man who makes a pact with the Devil; but Goethe was also a serious observer of nature, living at a time when geology, palaeontology and evolutionary thinking were still in their infancy.

In the early nineteenth century, Europeans had not yet accumulated the overwhelming evidence that Earth is billions of years old and that life has changed profoundly over vast periods of time. Many educated people still interpreted history, nature and morality through a biblical framework, even when their own thinking was more subtle than simple literalism. Goethe, despite his scientific curiosity, lived before Darwin, before modern stratigraphy was fully established, and long before modern imaging could reveal the hidden contents of an opaque piece of amber.

Now, of course, we know better, because of the tremendous scientific progress made over the last two centuries.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence Shows How Wrong The Bronze Age Myths In The Bible Were

A crouched burial of a 40 year old man in Oostwoud, the earliest known Bell Beaker grave identified by the researchers.

Source: Provincial Depot for Archaeology Noord-Holland.

DNA study uncovers continental origins of Britain’s bronze age population

Leaving a side the long history of archaic hominins such as the Neanderthals and their ancestors inhabiting Western Eurasia for about 250,000 years before the arrival of large numbers of anatomically modern humans, which itself is deeply problematic for creationists, there is also the archaeological record of the complext history of modern humans going back at least 40,000 years which simply would not be there if the Bible narrative of a recent spontaneous magical origin and a later global genocidal flood were true.

As reported in a paper in Nature last February (2026), the history of Northwest Europe and the Bristic Isles is far mpre complex and interesting that the simple Bronze Age fairy tail in Genesis.

Of course, the arcahaeolgeneticists never set out to disprove the Bible. The facts they revealed did that as a matter of course, because unlike Genesis, the facts record real events.

The contrast could hardly be more stark. Genesis gives us a world populated from a single specially-created human pair, followed by a later repopulation of the world from Noah’s family after a global flood, and then the dispersal of peoples after Babel. That is a story of magical manufacture, catastrophic reset and sudden dispersal. The ancient DNA tells a completely different story: long-lived regional populations, gradual migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, local ecological adaptation and no global genetic bottleneck compatible with a recent universal flood.

Refuting Creationism - Another Bizarre Dinosaur - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén.

Heron-like, fish-eating dinosaur from 70 million years ago discovered in Argentina - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In my previous post, I wrote about Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre distant relative of the crocodile line which walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and possessed a toothless mouth tipped with a beak. Although not a dinosaur, it looked superficially dinosaur-like — a neat example of convergent evolution. Because earlier and later shuvosaurids were already known from the region, palaeontologists predicted that a form occupying the gap between them should exist, and Labrujasuchus duly turned up in the right place and in the right rock formation.

That is how science works: evidence fits into a testable, predictive framework. Creationism, by contrast, has nothing to offer except hand-waving, misrepresentation and denial when confronted with a bizarre extinct archosaur from some 212 million years ago, just as it has nothing to offer in explanation of this almost equally bizarre dinosaur from about 70 million years ago.

The new species, Kank australis, is described by palaeontologist Dr Matías J. Motta, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”), and his colleagues in a paper published on 28 May 2026 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Kank australis was a paravian theropod — an unenlagiid, belonging to a group of small- to medium-sized raptor-like dinosaurs known from Late Cretaceous Gondwanan deposits. Its discoverers suggest that it may have lived rather like a large heron. Its long jaws, armed with teeth, suggest a fish-eating habit, while its cervical vertebrae show structures associated with muscle attachment and the protection of neck blood vessels, features comparable with those seen in modern birds that rely on rapid, precise neck movements. In other words, this was probably not the familiar pop-culture image of a raptor as a fast-running terrestrial predator, but a specialised animal exploiting the riverine and wetland ecosystems of southern Patagonia.

And, as so often with new fossil discoveries, Kank australis fills in yet another of those gaps so beloved of creationists looking for somewhere to hide their ever-shrinking little god. In this case, it helps bridge a distributional gap in the Late Cretaceous record of southern Patagonia, connecting better-known unenlagiid records from northern Patagonia with those from Antarctica, and adding more detail to the still-patchy evolutionary history of these South American paravian dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - Bizarre Creature From The Long History of Earth Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus

Art by Jorge Gonzalez
© NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus, a new species of Shuvosauridae from Late Triassic rocks of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

Art by Jorge Gonzalez, © NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

New Species of Bizarre, Bipedal, Toothless Crocodile Relative from the Triassic Discovered | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

Evolution, proceeding without a plan and lacking any sense of direction, can produce some truly bizarre creatures which, despite their appearance, survived perfectly well in the environments in which they evolved. Indeed, it would be bizarre to suppose otherwise, given that natural selection favours those forms that work well enough to survive and reproduce over those less well fitted to do so. To suppose otherwise would rival creationism for irrationality.

In this post, I’ll deal with a bizarre distant relative of the crocodiles; in the next, I’ll write about a strange theropod dinosaur from 70 million years ago that comes close to what any creationist might imagine a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds should look like.

Creationism is, of course, itself the product of an evolutionary process, forced into ever more bizarre forms by the hostile environment of scientific evidence. Modern creationism has therefore, by a similar process, become almost as bizarre as the life forms it is forced to deny in order to survive.

The sad thing is that creationists are denied the wonder of the truth about our planet as revealed in increasingly astonishing detail by science, because the facts must be waved aside and denied in order to cling to the childishly simplistic belief in magic and a world full of evil conspirators diligently working to trick them into changing their minds.

Who, for example, could have predicted that a distant relative of the crocodiles walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and had a toothless mouth tipped with a beak? It is almost as bizarre as the mental gymnastics creationists need to perform to dismiss it and force-fit the evidence into the predetermined conclusion that it must have been magically created within the last few thousand years and then allowed to go extinct for no apparent purpose — or that the evidence must either have been forged, misinterpreted or planted to test or deceive us.

Nevertheless, this creature, Labrujasuchus expectatus, did exist about 212 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, and its description is the subject of a recent paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Its fossilised remains were unearthed in Late Triassic rocks at the Hayden Quarry, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA, by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Alan H. Turner of Stony Brook University, New York, USA, with colleagues including Dr Nathan D. Smith of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California, USA.

To add insult to injury for creationists, this find fills one of those beloved gaps into which creationists try to force fit their creator god. The gap was that between two earlier discovered shuvosaurs from the region. It's discovery was thus a predicted by the Theory of Evolution, not by a book of Bronze Age mythology.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - This Evidence Wouldn't Exist If The Genesis Myths Were Real History

An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleolithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. This kind of wood was used for the Marathousa 1 digging stick. Use-wear analysis of stone tools at Marathousa 1 shows evidence of woodworking.

Credit: Original art by G. Prieto, copyright K. Harvati.

Earliest evidence of wooden tools used by humans - University of Reading

This is another of those pieces of evidence that should not exist if the Bible narrative were true — yet it does. The only honest conclusion is that the Bible narrative is false. It simply never happened. In scientific terms, this is falsification.

The evidence was published on 26 January 2026 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). It consists of two worked wooden objects discovered at Marathousa 1, in Greece’s central Peloponnese, by an international team led by researchers from the University of Reading, the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. The tools have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, making them the earliest known hand-held wooden tools and pushing back direct evidence for this kind of technology by at least 40,000 years.

That is awkward evidence for creationists, because the Bible is commonly interpreted by them as saying that humans were created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global flood that supposedly covered even the highest mountains. Such an event should either have obliterated fragile evidence of wooden tool use or buried it beneath a thick, worldwide layer of flood sediment containing the remains of the animals and plants destroyed in that catastrophe. And, of course, loose wooden tools submerged in a global flood would hardly be expected to remain neatly preserved in the archaeological context in which they were used.

Yet these wooden tools exist. They were recovered from secure Middle Pleistocene deposits, not from some chaotic jumble of flood debris. They are associated with stone tools, worked bone and butchered animal remains, including elephant, showing that Marathousa 1 was a lakeshore site used by early humans for a range of activities, including butchery and woodworking. In other words, the evidence is not floating around without context; it forms part of a coherent archaeological scene about 420,000 years older than the creationist date for the magical creation of Earth and everything on it.

One of the objects is a small alder trunk fragment with clear traces of shaping and use-wear, consistent with a multifunctional digging stick probably used at the edge of the ancient lake. The other is a much smaller worked piece of willow or poplar, possibly representing a previously unknown type of small Pleistocene wooden tool. A third piece of alder, initially investigated as a possible artefact, appears instead to have been marked by a large carnivore, possibly a bear — another indication that humans and carnivores were exploiting the same lakeshore environment.

The Marathousa 1 site lay in the Megalopolis Basin, a region that appears to have acted as a glacial refugium during a critical period in human evolution, when more complex behaviours and more diverse technologies were developing. The finds show early humans using not just stone, but wood and bone too — exactly what we should expect from intelligent, adaptable hominins making use of the materials around them, and exactly what is so rarely preserved because wood normally decays long before it can fossilise or survive archaeologically.

Creationism Refuted - Australian Crocodiles Are Fatal To Creationism

Saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus poros

By Molly Ebersold
St Augustine's Alligator Farm,
Public Domain, Link

Jorgo Ristevski, CC BY

129,000 years of crocodiles: what we know about Australasia’s ancient apex predators

According to Bronze Age Biblical mythology, existing species should have no ancestors because they were all supposedly magicked into existence fully formed during a few days of creation, just a few thousand years ago.

That childish belief has to be clung to by creationists despite the evidence of the real world, which tells a very different story: not of sudden manufacture, but of deep evolutionary history, extinction, replacement and survival. The iconic saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia provide a good example. They are not isolated products of a one-off act of creation, but living survivors of a much richer Australasian crocodylian history stretching back tens of millions of years, during which crocodile relatives occupied a variety of ecological niches, including those of formidable predators.

Modern Australia has only two native crocodile species: the freshwater crocodile, Crocodylus johnstoni, and the Indo-Pacific or saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus. But the fossil and archaeological evidence shows that these are merely the remnant survivors of a once more diverse crocodylian fauna, including the now-extinct mekosuchines, a distinctive Australasian group whose members included species very unlike the crocodiles familiar today.

Now a group of researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University, together with colleagues from several other institutions, has pieced together the fragmentary evidence from 26 fossil and archaeological sites across Australasia to build a clearer picture of the crocodylians that once lived in the region, and of their interactions with humans. Their review of the evidence was recently published, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The study shows that the late Pleistocene record of Australian crocodylians is still incomplete and often difficult to date securely, but it nevertheless reveals a lost diversity. The extinct mekosuchines appear to have declined and disappeared on mainland Australia around the same broad period as other Australian megafauna, while some survived much later on south-west Pacific islands such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji. There, their remains occur in archaeological contexts, suggesting that they persisted until after human arrival and may have been affected by human activity.

Three of the authors have also written an article in The Conversation, explaining their research and its significance for understanding the evolutionary history of these reptiles. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Europe's Most Complete Stegosauria Skull - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Illustration of Dacentrurus armatus.

Adrián Blázquez / Fundación Dinópolis.

Europe’s most complete stegosaurian skull unearthed in Teruel, Spain | Pensoft.blog

Another day, another dinosaur. At least, that must be how it feels to creationists trying to cling to demonstrably false beliefs by ignoring the evidence and pretending each new discovery is either a mistake, a fraud, or a sinister attempt by scientists to undermine their faith.

This time the problem comes from Teruel, Spain, where palaeontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis have described an exceptionally well-preserved partial skull of a stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Villar del Arzobispo Formation, dating to about 150 million years ago. Their results, published in May 2025 in the Pensoft journal Vertebrate Zoology, identify the fossil as belonging to Dacentrurus armatus, and as the most complete stegosaurian skull yet found in Europe.

That matters because stegosaurian skulls are notoriously rare. Their bones were fragile, and the animals’ skulls were small compared with their heavily built bodies, so cranial material is much less commonly preserved than vertebrae, limb bones, plates or tail spikes. A skull as complete as this one is therefore not just another fossil for a museum drawer, but a valuable piece of anatomical evidence for understanding how these plated, quadrupedal herbivores evolved.

Using this specimen, the researchers were able to refine the known anatomy of Dacentrurus armatus and reassess the evolutionary relationships of stegosaurs more generally. Their analysis supports the division of Stegosauria into two major clades, Huayangosauridae and Stegosauridae, and they formalise a further grouping, Neostegosauria, to include later-diverging stegosaurids. In other words, one skull from Spain helps clarify not only a single European dinosaur species, but the wider evolutionary history and geographical spread of the iconic plated dinosaurs.

If nothing else, work such as this illustrates how science treats a new discovery: not as a threat to be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with dogma, but as additional evidence to be tested against existing knowledge. Where necessary, classifications are revised, hypotheses are adjusted, and understanding moves a little closer to reality.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and then tries to make the evidence fit. Science starts with the evidence and changes the conclusion when the evidence demands it. That is why a 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull from Spain is a contribution to human knowledge, not a theological inconvenience to be waved away.