Creationism Refuted - Fish And Newts Share A Common Gene for Fin and LImb Growth - Common Origin

AI-generated depiction of common genetic origin of zebra fish and Iberian ribbed newts.

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The findings support a stepwise model for how the genetic program that builds vertebrate paired fins and limbs may have evolved. An ancestral Hox9–10 program may first have helped establish posterior appendages, later expanded into a broader Hox patterning system, and eventually been redeployed in anterior paired appendages.

Image after H. Nakazawa et al., (2026) CC BY-NC-ND.

Ancient Hox code reveals the developmental roots of vertebrate hind fins and limbs | EurekAlert!

Creationists who insist that fish and terrestrial vertebrates are separately created “kinds” have another piece of evidence to explain away. Beneath the obvious differences between a fish’s pelvic fins and an amphibian’s hindlimbs lies a shared developmental inheritance: related genes performing an essential early role in establishing the cells from which those structures develop. Evolutionary relationships are recorded not only in fossils and adult anatomy, but also in the processes that build living bodies.

This is illustrated by research led by scientists at Saitama University, Japan, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The researchers investigated Hox genes, regulatory genes involved in organising the developing body. Their experiments reveal a shared requirement for members of the Hox9–10 groups at the beginning of pelvic-fin and hindlimb development.

In zebrafish, disrupting five of these genes together eliminated the detectable populations of pelvic-fin progenitor cells—the cells that would normally give rise to the developing fins—and the pelvic fins failed to form. In Iberian ribbed newts, disrupting seven related genes likewise impaired the establishment of hindlimb progenitors. These results support the inference that this developmental function was already present in the common ancestor of ray-finned and lobe-finned vertebrates, before the evolutionary separation of the lineages represented by zebrafish and newts.

The significance extends beyond the discovery that different animals use related genes. The findings help connect the genetic programme that organises the rear of the body with the programme that initiates its paired hind appendages. They are consistent with an evolutionary model in which an ancestral programme was recruited, expanded and redeployed as the developmental machinery of paired fins and limbs evolved. The experiments do not directly reconstruct that entire historical sequence, but they provide functional evidence with which to assess it.

For intelligent design creationism, the familiar difficulty is that evolutionary innovation need not involve inventing every component afresh. Existing genes and developmental relationships can acquire additional roles as evolution modifies inherited systems. Calling those systems “designed” supplies no comparable account of when, where or how the changes occurred, nor does it improve the experimental explanation.

Refuting Creationism - Self-Assembly of A Complex Protein Without a Plan - No Magic Required!

AI-generated depiction of protein sub-units assembling to form a shell

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New method reveals how virus particles can build themselves, molecule by molecule | Oxford University

One of creationism’s favourite arguments depends on treating chemistry as a lottery in which every conceivable molecular arrangement is equally likely, and the winning combination must appear in a single lucky throw. Count enough possible combinations, announce an astronomical improbability, and declare that a supernatural designer must have intervened. Apart from the obvious false dichotomy fallacy, What this argument ignores is precisely what matters: molecules have physical and chemical properties that make some interactions more likely than others, and complex structures can assemble through successive intermediate stages, in a process that parallels the trial and error of evolution.

Research by scientists at the University of Oxford provides a striking illustration. In a study published open access in Nature, the team followed the assembly of an engineered virus-like particle containing 60 protein units. Using a technique that measures molecular mass through scattered light, they tracked individual particles as they grew. The advance was being able to observe the intermediate steps of a process whose beginning and end are much easier to study.

The components initially form weak, reversible associations. Unstable arrangements can break apart, leaving their components available for further encounters. Certain closed arrangements, however, gain stability through multiple connections. These become intermediate stages from which assembly can proceed. The result is a physically constrained pathway through a huge range of possibilities, without machinery directing the placement of every component, all depending on the relative strengths and weaknesses of chemical bonds.

There is an instructive parallel here with evolution, provided we recognise its limits. Molecular assembly does not involve reproduction, inherited variation and differential reproductive success, so it is not Darwinian evolution. Nevertheless, both expose the weakness of imagining that a complex outcome must arise in one wholly random step. “Trial and error” is useful shorthand: unsuccessful arrangements need not persist, while stable intermediates can support further construction. Neither molecules nor natural selection need to anticipate the eventual result.

Unintelligent Design News - How RNA Can Harm The Cell - Incompetence, Malevolence Or Evolution?

AI-generated illustration of RNA overload.

ChatGPT-6 Astra.

Too much RNA can starve cells of energy, study finds – Texas A&M Stories

What sort of omniscient designer would make a cell dependent on a molecule that, when allowed to accumulate, can damage its energy-generating machinery? Presumably, one who could foresee the problem would also be capable of avoiding it. Yet research from Texas A&M University reveals precisely this vulnerability: RNA, indispensable to the functioning of living cells, can interfere with mitochondrial energy production when its abundance escapes normal control.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concern the relationship between RNA turnover and mitochondrial function. Messenger RNA carries instructions used to manufacture proteins, but those messages must also be broken down. The researchers found that this disposal process does more than regulate gene expression: it helps protect the machinery that supplies much of a cell’s usable energy.

Working with vaccinia virus, the team found that disrupting the breakdown of RNA allowed it to accumulate and severely impaired mitochondrial respiration. Further experiments showed that excess messenger RNA and double-stranded RNA could impair mitochondria even outside intact cells. The effect therefore did not require the usual antiviral immune responses. Excess RNA reduced mitochondrial membrane potential, a crucial component of the energy gradient used to make ATP. Precisely how RNA produces this disruption remains to be established.

This is not a case of cells having no safeguards. They have elaborate systems for controlling RNA abundance. The difficulty for intelligent design is that an essential component can become a threat to another essential component, leaving the cell dependent on continual regulation and clearance. Calling the safeguards evidence of brilliant design merely invites the question of why an all-knowing, all-powerful designer chose an arrangement with this vulnerability in the first place.

There is no comparable puzzle for evolution. Natural selection has no foresight, no drawing board and no opportunity to start again with an entirely different biochemistry. It acts on heritable variation in existing systems, favouring changes whose effects improve reproductive success under prevailing conditions. Benefits can outweigh costs without eliminating them, and a mechanism that works adequately under ordinary circumstances can remain vulnerable when conditions change. This study illustrates such a vulnerability; it does not establish the precise historical trade-offs that produced it.

Refuting Creationism - The Blind Cave Snail That Evolved by LOSS of Information

Erhaia dijiang.

Credit: Yue-Ming He, et al., 2026

Erhaia dijiang.

Credit Yue-Ming He, et al., 2026.

China’s First Cave-Dwelling Freshwater Snail Named After A Mythical Mountain God | Pensoft Blog

A tiny, eyeless snail living in a Chinese cave offers an instructive challenge to two familiar creationist assumptions: that evolution must mean increasing complexity, and that the natural world was arranged for the benefit of humans. Erhaia dijiang has neither eyes nor body pigmentation, and its existence remained unknown to science until researchers investigated its obscure underground habitat. For an animal supposedly included in a creation designed around us, it has kept a remarkably low profile.

Described by Yue-Ming He and colleagues in Subterranean Biology, the species was discovered in a cave in Yuxi City, Yunnan Province, at an altitude of 2,062 metres. It is reported as China's first recorded freshwater cave snail. Its translucent shell, unpigmented body and absence of eyes are characteristic of an animal specialised for subterranean life. Appropriately, its name honours Di Jiang, a faceless being from Chinese mythology.

The evolutionary lesson is straightforward: evolution has no obligation to produce increasingly elaborate organisms. It can involve the reduction or loss of structures, just as it can produce new structures or modify existing ones. Eyes are useful where there is light to see by; in permanent darkness, their usual advantage disappears. Selection maintaining functional eyes can consequently weaken, allowing mutations that impair them to persist. Where reduced investment in unnecessary structures improves reproductive success, natural selection can also favour that reduction. The precise contributions of these processes have not been established for this particular snail, but its eyeless condition fits a familiar pattern of evolution in subterranean animals.

Comparable reductions occur in many parasites, including the loss of digestive structures in animals that absorb nutrients from their hosts. This is not evolution going backwards: evolution has no predetermined destination from which to retreat. Nor does losing one organ mean that an animal has become simpler in every respect. It means that particular features have changed within a particular ecological setting. Calling such changes “degeneration”, as creationists often do, does not place them outside evolutionary biology or explain them away.

Refuting Creationism - Closing The Gap - Life In The Early Ediacaran - 600 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Macrofossils from the Doushantuo formation at Ancangping. A–F: Ribbon-shaped vendotaenids. G: Conotubular Protoconites minor H: Balloon-shaped Longfengshania. I: Tangled filaments similar to Zunyiphyton.

Ye, Q., An, Z., Chen, S. et al (2026)

Microfossils from the Ancangping assemblage. A: Schizofusa zangwenlongii. B, C: Ericiasphaera magna (C is enlarged view of rectangle in B). D, E: Appendisphaera anguina. (E is enlarged view of rectangle in D). F: Eotylotopalla strobilata. G: Eotylotopalla quadrata. H: Megasphaera ornata. I: Sinosphaera asteriformis. J, K: Tanarium cuspidatum. (K is enlarged view of rectangle in J).

Credit: Ye, Q., An, Z., Chen, S. et al (2026)

Tiny fossils reveal a missing chapter of ocean life after Snowball Earth

More than 600 million years before the supposed creation of Earth in a literal reading of Genesis, marine communities were already living through the aftermath of a planetary ice age. Their fossilised remains now provide another inconvenient glimpse of the immense history that young-Earth creationism requires its followers to dismiss. This was a world with an evolutionary past of its own, long before the appearance of familiar animals, let alone humans and their origin myths.

A study by Qin Ye of the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan and colleagues, published in Communications Biology, describes an assemblage of microscopic and larger fossils from Ancangping in Hubei province, South China. The researchers identified 35 species of organic-walled microfossils known as acritarchs, together with six broad forms of macroscopic fossils. Preserved together, these remains provide an unusually useful window into communities that included both organisms living in the water column and algae growing on the seabed.

The assemblage is provisionally dated to approximately 620–610 million years ago. That places it around 15–25 million years after the end of the Marinoan glaciation, one of the extreme climatic episodes associated with “Snowball Earth”, when ice extended into tropical latitudes. “After” therefore needs to be understood on a geological timescale: even the interval between the thaw and these organisms exceeds the entire young-Earth creationist chronology many thousands of times over.

Refuting Creationism - A Peculiar Belemnite From Wyoming - 160 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of Wyoteuthis linsterorum in the Sundance Sea

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Artists impression of Wyoteuthis linsterorum

Jasom C Poole.

“Peculiar” new species of Jurassic squid found in Wyoming

Some 160 million years ago, a peculiar, thick-bodied relative of modern squid inhabited the sea that covered parts of what is now Wyoming. That alone places it inconveniently far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. Now, two rare fossils have revealed that this animal was also a late-surviving representative of an ancient belemnite lineage — another small but revealing piece of an evolutionary history that creationism requires its followers to deny.

The newly described species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, is the subject of a paper in Papers in Palaeontology. Although the headline calls it a Jurassic squid, it was a belemnite: a member of an extinct group of squid-like cephalopods. Its most striking feature was its exceptionally broad internal shell component, known as the rostrum or guard. Where familiar belemnite guards resemble slender bullets, these specimens are unusually stout, earning their owner the distinction of having the thickest known belemnite guards.

The fossils come from the Sundance Formation and date to the Oxfordian stage of the Late Jurassic. Examination of their external features and CT scans of their interiors led the researchers to assign the animal to the Megateuthididae, a family that had largely disappeared earlier in the Jurassic. Rather than representing a newly created form appearing from nowhere, Wyoteuthis appears to have been a surviving offshoot of an older evolutionary lineage, persisting in a regional refuge after its relatives had declined elsewhere.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem is straightforward. An animal living approximately 160 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a universe supposedly created just 6,000–10,000 years ago. Nor does calling its remains a product of Noah’s Flood explain away the geological succession in which they occur. The problem is not merely the existence of a marine fossil on dry land, but its place within an ordered history of changing environments and successive assemblages of organisms.

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

European nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus

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

Photo: Urban Rundström.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Carr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - Dinosaur Tracks Record Transition From Crawling to Bipedalism

Holotype of Pachychirotherium gardenaensis

Photo: @ University La Sapienza of Roma.

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - How Cephalopods Evolved Intelligence - No Magic Needed

Cephalopods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Stromata of Dianjunus rex attached to host root.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste of Spawning Coral

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

Spawning coral release quintillions of eggs each year: new research

spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

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

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

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

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

AI-generated impression of Ctenosuchus tenuidens hunting.

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An artist’s restoration of Ctenosuchus tenuidens.

Artwork by Nathan Dehaut.

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

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

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

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

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

[caption]

[credit]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

Holotype specimen of Dongoconodon platycauda

Reconstruction of the semi-aquatic life of Dongoconodon platycauda

Drawn by Chen Yu.

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

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

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

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

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

AI depiction of yak on the Tibetan Plateau

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

From Oppenheimer, Jonas; et al (2026)

Previously unknown extinct bovine species discovered in Siberia - Stockholms universitet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Borzo Gharibi, Science Advances (2026).

An ancient advantage, hijacked by cancer | Crick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, 543 Millian Years Ago

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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