A paper recently published in Science Advances by an international team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) will make disappointing reading for any creationist with enough courage to read a scientific paper—especially those pinning their hopes on science never closing their favourite gap: the gap between geochemistry and the first living systems.
Leaving that gap permanently open would allow them to declare, “God did it!”, without providing a scrap of supporting evidence or explaining how their preferred god supposedly made chemistry and physics behave in ways that they could not have done unaided. This combination of the god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy—either science already has a complete explanation, or magic must have been responsible—is standard creationist fare in the absence of positive evidence for a creator.
The new research does not, as some headlines might suggest, show that abiogenesis occurred twice independently. Instead, it presents evidence that the genetic code and a core metabolic network had a single origin before the ancestral lineage divided into Bacteria and Archaea, but that the two lineages subsequently completed the transition to free-living cells independently. As senior author William F. Martin expressed it, the findings point to “one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life”—with “life” here referring specifically to autonomous, free-living cellular life.
The findings therefore do not overturn universal common ancestry. Both Bacteria and Archaea still trace their ancestry to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. What the researchers propose is that LUCA was not yet a fully independent cell equipped with enzymes for every essential metabolic reaction. It remained partly dependent on inorganic catalysts supplied by the hydrothermal environment in which its metabolism had evolved. Only after the bacterial and archaeal lineages had diverged did each independently evolve the remaining enzymes needed to become free-living.
Engraved ostrich eggshell fragments from around 60,000 years ago found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter. Archaeologists believe the fragments probably originate from eggs used as storage containers.
Archaeologists led by researchers from the Università di Bologna, Italy have shown that designs carved more than 60,000 years ago on Ostrich shells were deliberate, structured designs, not random or casually improvised marks. They published their findings in PLOS ONE in February 2026.
The problem for creationists is that none of this evidence should exist if their favourite Bible myths were true. There could have been neither humans making these engravings nor ostriches producing the eggshells 60,000 years ago, because, according to the young-Earth creationist chronology, Earth itself did not yet exist. Nor could delicate engraved fragments have remained embedded in recognisable, archaeologically ordered deposits if the entire region had subsequently been submerged and violently rearranged by a planet-covering flood only a few thousand years ago.
And yet the evidence is there. Creationists must therefore perform the customary mental gymnastics—rejecting the dating, misrepresenting the geology, bearing false witness against the scientists or even presenting their god as a cosmic trickster who deliberately formed evidence such as this to fool us when it created the world — anything, apparently, rather than allowing demonstrable facts to modify a cherished belief.
The researchers assembled a dataset of images showing 112 engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Diepkloof and Klipdrift in South Africa and Apollo 11 in Namibia. Three badly worn fragments were excluded from the statistical analysis because their markings could not be reconstructed reliably. Using geometric and statistical techniques not previously applied systematically to these artefacts, the team traced the lines and examined their angles, alignments, intersections and spatial relationships.
The analysis identified recurring cognitive operations involving rotation, translation, iteration and “embedding”—the nesting of elements within additional hierarchical levels of a design. Parallel lines, near-right angles, hatched bands, grids and diamond-shaped motifs were combined according to consistent spatial rules. More than 90 per cent of the statistically assessed fragments conformed closely to models of regular parallel alignment or angular organisation, while orthogonality and spatial regularity characterised more than 80 per cent of the dataset overall.
These were therefore not merely scratches or repeated movements. The engravers exercised deliberate control over the placement and orientation of the lines, constructing what the researchers describe as a “geometric grammar”. The patterns indicate visual-spatial planning and suggest that their makers had an overall conception of the design before or while engraving it. They provide an early material expression of abstract, rule-governed graphic thought.
These artefacts do not, by themselves, identify the first appearance of abstract thought, nor do they provide a complete history of the evolution of human intelligence. What they offer is a remarkably ancient snapshot of sophisticated cognition in Homo sapiens. Together with the wider archaeological record, they fit an evolutionary history in which human cognitive and symbolic abilities arose and developed within the hominin lineage—not one in which fully modern humans, complete with all their intellectual abilities, were produced suddenly by magic a few thousand years ago.
There is enough for a substantial side-panel. One useful point to emphasise is that the famous painted stones from Apollo 11 are much younger than its engraved eggshell fragments and should not be conflated with them.
Diepkloof, Klipdrift and Apollo 11.
The engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments examined in this research came from three rock shelters associated with the Howiesons Poort, a Middle Stone Age technological tradition found across southern Africa. Dating broadly to about 65,000–60,000 years ago, Howiesons Poort assemblages include carefully made stone blades and backed tools, composite implements, the controlled heating of stone and evidence of symbolic or decorative behaviour.
The name describes a widespread technocomplex—a recurring combination of technologies and artefact types—not a single tribe or homogeneous culture.
Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa
Diepkloof is a large quartzitic-sandstone shelter overlooking the Verlorenvlei River in South Africa’s Western Cape, about 17 kilometres from the present Atlantic shoreline. Its deposits preserve one of southern Africa’s most extensive Middle Stone Age sequences, recording intermittent human occupation from before 130,000 to approximately 45,000 years ago.
The shelter contains layers of ash, charcoal, hearth debris and burnt bedding left by successive groups of occupants. Archaeologists have also recovered stone tools, animal bones, marine shells and exceptionally well-preserved plant remains, providing evidence of the environment, diet and activities of the people who used the shelter.
Hundreds of engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments have been recovered from its Howiesons Poort layers. Some pieces preserve perforated openings, supporting the interpretation that the eggshells had been converted into portable water flasks. The engravings include parallel lines, intersecting lines, cross-hatching and especially hatched bands. Their distribution through numerous successive layers indicates a graphic tradition maintained for several thousand years rather than a single episode of decoration.
The precise chronology of some Diepkloof layers remains debated. The authors of the 2026 study adopted a date range of approximately 65,000–60,000 years ago for comparison with the other sites.
In 2024, Diepkloof was included in the UNESCO World Heritage property The Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour: The Pleistocene Occupation Sites of South Africa.
Klipdrift Shelter, South Africa
Klipdrift Shelter forms part of a cave complex in the De Hoop Nature Reserve on South Africa’s southern Cape coast. It should not be confused with the adjacent Klipdrift Cave: the shelter contains the relevant Middle Stone Age deposits, whereas the cave has principally yielded much younger Later Stone Age material.
Optically stimulated luminescence dating places the Howiesons Poort occupation of Klipdrift Shelter between approximately 65,500 and 59,400 years ago. Its well-preserved layers contain hearths, stone tools, ochre, marine shells, animal and plant remains and a human molar. The inhabitants exploited both terrestrial animals and coastal resources.
The site has also provided evidence that silcrete was deliberately heated to improve its suitability for making stone tools. Small backed pieces could have been mounted on wooden shafts using compound adhesives, demonstrating considerable technological knowledge and forward planning.
More than 95 engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments have been reported from its Howiesons Poort layers. Their designs include parallel lines, cross-hatching and diamond-shaped arrangements. In the 2026 analysis, the diamond motif was confined to Klipdrift and appeared in the final phase of its Howiesons Poort sequence, suggesting that particular designs could have local or chronological significance.
Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia
Apollo 11 Rockshelter lies in the Huns Mountains of southern Namibia. It contains the longest known late-Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sequence in the country, with deposits representing several Middle Stone Age traditions—including the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort—as well as later occupations.
The shelter received its modern name from archaeologist Wolfgang Erich Wendt, who was excavating there in 1969 when he heard of the safe return of the Apollo 11 lunar crew.
Only two engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Apollo 11 were available for the 2026 geometric analysis. Both carry intersecting, approximately parallel lines associated with the Howiesons Poort occupation. Although the sample is small, it extends the geographical distribution of this engraving practice well beyond the South African Cape.
Apollo 11 is better known for seven painted quartzite slabs recovered from a much later archaeological level. Painted with charcoal, ochre and white pigment and depicting animals or possible composite creatures, these portable artworks date to about 30,000 years ago and are among the earliest securely dated examples of figurative art in Africa. They are important in their own right but are not contemporary with the approximately 60,000-year-old engraved eggshells.
Why the three sites matter
Taken together, the sites show that engraving ostrich-eggshell containers was not an isolated accident or the idiosyncratic activity of one individual. Related geometric practices occurred across widely separated parts of southern Africa and persisted through multiple occupation layers.
At the same time, differences between the sites—hatched bands at Diepkloof, diamonds at Klipdrift and intersecting parallel lines at Apollo 11—suggest local traditions and changes through time. The engravers shared the cognitive ability to organise lines according to geometric rules, but they did not simply reproduce one rigid, unchanging design.
The paper in PLOS ONE was accompanied by an article in Unibo Magazine, the University of Bologna’s online news magazine:
Humanity’s oldest geometries, engraved on ostrich eggsAn analysis of the markings found on hundreds of eggshell fragments dating back more than 60,000 years, unearthed between South Africa and Namibia, has revealed our ancestors’ remarkable ability to organise visual space according to abstract principles
At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo sapiens who lived in that region.
A new investigation, led by researchers from the University of Bologna, has now revealed for the first time that these engravings on ostrich eggshells were not random or improvised, but followed recurring and surprisingly organised geometric rules. The study - published in the journal PLOS One - shows the presence of a genuine cognitive organisation of forms, based on parallelism, orthogonality and the repetition of lines and regular patterns.
These signs reveal a surprisingly structured, geometric way of thinking. We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines, but organised them according to recurring principles - parallelisms, grids, rotations and systematic repetitions: a visual grammar in embryo.
Professor Silvia Ferrara, senior author
Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy.
The ostrich eggshells were most likely used as water containers. The researchers carried out a quantitative and systematic investigation of 112 fragments from two South African archaeological sites (Diepkloof and Klipdrift) and one site in Namibia (Apollo 11). By applying methods of geometric and statistical analysis never previously used on these artefacts, the study made it possible to reconstruct in detail the lines, angles and trajectories of the markings.
The results show that more than 80% of the configurations analysed display coherent spatial regularities, with repeated use of angles close to 90° and groups of parallel lines. The most complex compositions - such as hatched bands, grids and diamond-shaped motifs - reveal cognitive operations of rotation, translation, repetition and “embedding”, i.e. the ability to build hierarchical levels of signs within the same surface.
These engravings are organised and consistent, and show mastery of geometric relationships. There is not only a process of repeating signs: there is real visuo-spatial planning, as if the authors already had an overall image of the figure in mind before engraving it.
Professor Silvia Ferrara, senior author
Beyond the possible meanings of the markings, the authors stress that the implications of the study concern above all the cognitive foundations that made it possible to create these decorations. The ability to construct visual configurations structured according to specific rules can be seen as a key indicator of the emergence of abstract thought - a crucial step in the evolution of human thinking.
Our analysis shows that Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago already possessed a remarkable ability to organise visual space according to abstract principles. Transforming simple forms into complex systems by following defined rules is a deeply human trait that has characterised our history over millennia, from the creation of decorations to the development of symbolic systems and, ultimately, writing.
Valentina Decembrini, first author
Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy.
Abstract
This article presents the first quantitative geometric and spatial analysis of engraved ostrich eggshell (EOES) fragments from the Howiesons Poort (HP) technocomplex of the African late Middle Stone Age (MSA), to evaluate whether the EOES demonstrates genuine formal structuring and visuo-spatial organization. By considering their ‘non-accidental properties’—such as curvature, parallelism, and co-termination—which remain consistent across different viewpoints, as well as their metric properties, including angular inclinations, based on empirical thresholds, we show that the HP dataset systematically employs salient geometric features. These features are combined and embedded through complex cognitive operations, including the iteration and alignment of parallel lines, rotation of lines generating intersections with variable angular openings, and translation of specific elements nested within organized spatial layouts. These engravings therefore constitute an early material expression of complex graphic representation, attesting to a species-specific human capacity for organizing geometric thought. Overall, the patterns reflect a system of rules through which Homo sapiens in the HP organized visual forms, revealing the cognitive foundations of structured graphic behavior.
What these engraved fragments preserve is not merely a collection of decorations but evidence of established human cultural traditions. Across three widely separated sites, people living about 60,000 years ago converted ostrich eggs into useful containers and embellished them with carefully planned geometric patterns. Differences between sites and between successive archaeological layers show that these traditions varied geographically and changed over time—precisely what we should expect from cultures developing through ordinary human invention, learning and transmission.
For young-Earth creationism, the chronology alone is fatal. These people were organising visual space according to abstract rules more than 50,000 years before the supposed “Creation Week”. The dates do not depend upon one questionable object or an isolated measurement: the fragments occur within ordered sequences containing stone tools, hearths, food remains and environmental evidence, all of which together document repeated human occupation over immense periods of time.
Nor is there any trace of the global catastrophe that creationists place only a few thousand years ago. The shelters preserve fine layers of ash, charcoal, burnt bedding and fragile eggshell accumulated during successive occupations. They have not been churned together, swept away or buried beneath the chaotic debris that a mountain-covering global flood would necessarily have produced. Instead, their stratigraphy records continuity, local environmental change and human activity—not planetary destruction.
The researchers needed neither a magical creation nor a supernatural injection of intelligence to explain what they found. They saw members of our own evolved species displaying sophisticated planning, abstraction and cultural learning deep in the African Stone Age. Once again, science reveals a richly detailed human past where creationism insists there could have been no past at all—and once again, it is the evidence, not the mythology, that survives examination.
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A team led by scientists at Eurac Research, a private research centre based in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy, has reconstructed a remarkably detailed picture of the microbial community associated with Ötzi, the Copper Age man whose naturally mummified body emerged from melting ice high in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Their findings, like so much relevant scientific evidence, are utterly incompatible with Bible-based creationist mythology.
According to young-Earth creationist dogma, the creator god committed an act of global genocide by drowning almost every terrestrial human and animal beneath a flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains. The precise date varies even among creationist organisations: Answers in Genesis places the Flood in 2348 BCE, while the Institute for Creation Research has calculated a date of about 2472 BCE. Both accept the claim derived from the Masoretic text of Genesis that the Flood occurred just 1,656 years after “Creation Week”, when everything was supposedly made from nothing by magic.
Several centuries before either of those proposed Flood dates, however, a man died at an altitude of about 3,200 metres in the Ötztal Alps. His body, clothing and equipment were preserved in a protected, icy hollow until melting ice exposed them in 1991, more than 5,000 years later. That man, now known as Ötzi or the Iceman, is still providing scientists with information about the life, health and microbial companions of a Copper Age European.
The Eurac-led team combined microbial cultivation with DNA sequencing and metagenomic analysis to distinguish between different components of the microbial community associated with the mummy. These included remnants of Ötzi’s original intestinal microbiome, microorganisms that colonised his body after death in the glacial environment, and modern contaminants introduced during more than three decades of museum conservation.
It is not often that fossilised faeces take centre stage in an explanation of one of the most important episodes in evolutionary history. However, a review published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution suggests that the evolution of digestive systems—and the resulting production of faecal pellets—may have helped to transform the chemistry and ecology of the oceans during the Cambrian radiation.
In The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation, palaeontologists Julien Kimmig and Russell D.C. Bicknell bring together evidence from fossil digestive systems and coprolites—fossilised faeces—from more than 35 deposits around the world. They found that coprolites became progressively more abundant and varied during the Cambrian Period, ranging from microscopic pellets to centimetre-sized masses containing shells and fragments of other animals.
This change coincided with the evolution of increasingly sophisticated digestive systems. Early animals with blind guts had only one opening through which food entered and waste was expelled. The evolution of a through-gut, with a separate mouth and anus, permitted food to move continuously through the body. Animals could feed more frequently, process a greater variety of foods and adopt new ecological roles. Early arthropods, in particular, developed specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of extracting nutrients from increasingly diverse prey.
According to the authors, the consequences extended far beyond the animals producing the waste. Faecal pellets packaged organic matter and nutrients—including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron—and transported them through the water column and into deeper environments. In modern oceans, this sinking material forms an important part of the biological pump that carries carbon and nutrients away from surface waters. Kimmig and Bicknell propose that the beginnings of a comparable process during the Cambrian helped to fertilise previously nutrient-poor environments and support more complex food webs.
Only a few days after writing about Darwin’s famous Galápagos finches and how the Galápagos daisy had parallelled their evolutionary radiation, another group of island birds provides an even more spectacular example of adaptive radiation.
This time the setting is the Hawaiian archipelago, and the birds are the Hawaiian honeycreepers — an extraordinary collection of finches that evolved an assortment of beaks, diets and ways of life from a shared ancestral population.
More than 60 species of Hawaiian honeycreeper are known, ranging from thick-billed seed-eaters and nectar-feeders to birds with long, curved beaks for probing flowers or extracting insects from beneath bark. Some became so anatomically different that, before their evolutionary relationships were understood, naturalists found it difficult to believe that they could all be related.
But related they are. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael G. Campana and colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and National Museum of Natural History, the honeycreepers form a single adaptive radiation whose history includes not only repeated branching into new species but also genetic exchange between some of those emerging lineages.
Impression of a Tyrannosaurus rex attacking an Edmontosaurus annectens
AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
Tooth traces on ulna HRS10076.
A) Ulna with black boxes indicating areas with tooth traces. B-C) Magnification of corresponding boxes from Fig 7A. White arrows indicate pits and red arrows indicate parallel scores.
Last month produced the usual crop of research papers which, quite incidentally, refuted creationism simply by revealing evidence utterly incompatible with its basic dogmas. It also produced another answer to a favourite creationist conspiracy theory: that scientists are not permitted to publish anything that challenges the supposedly ‘materialist orthodoxy’ of the scientific establishment.
This allegation confuses philosophical materialism with methodological naturalism. Science confines itself to explanations that can be tested against evidence. That is a working method, not a compulsory metaphysical belief. Findings that challenge established interpretations are not prohibited; provided they are supported by evidence and survive critical scrutiny, they are an essential part of the way science advances.
Literalist creationism works in the opposite direction. It begins with the non-negotiable conclusion that scripture must be inerrant, so any contrary evidence must be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with that predetermined belief. Changing one’s mind in response to evidence is therefore treated not as intellectual honesty but as a failure of faith.
Creationists consequently try to have it both ways. When scientists agree, this is presented as evidence of a conspiracy suppressing dissent; when scientists challenge or refine an earlier interpretation, it supposedly proves that scientists are always changing their minds and that science is therefore unreliable. It is a convenient rhetorical trick in which both consistency and self-correction are declared to be evidence against science.
A modest but revealing example is a study published recently in PLOS ONE by researchers from Loma Linda University, Western University of Health Sciences, The Master’s University, Southern Adventist University and Southwestern Adventist University. Four of those five institutions are explicitly Christian: Loma Linda, Southern Adventist and Southwestern Adventist are Seventh-day Adventist universities, while The Master’s University declares a commitment to Christ and ‘biblical fidelity’. So much for the supposed exclusion of religious scientists from mainstream scientific publication.
The paper itself is not creationist research: it employs standard palaeontological methods and places the fossils within the conventional Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous. What it does show is that evidence-based research can be published and scrutinised irrespective of the religious affiliations of the institutions involved.
The researchers examined 3,013 dinosaur bones, most belonging to Edmontosaurus annectens, excavated between 1997 and 2017 from the Hanson Ranch Station bonebed in the Lance Formation of eastern Wyoming. Thirteen bones initially displayed perforations or other features that resembled tooth traces. Closer examination—including microscopy, comparison with other fossils and, in an ambiguous case, CT scanning—showed that one specimen contained normal openings in the bone, or foramina, rather than bite marks. The remaining 12 bones, just under 0.4 per cent of the total examined, preserved genuine tooth traces.
Four of those bones carried particularly diagnostic traces known as Knethichnus parallelum and Linichnus serratus. By comparing the spacing of the preserved striations and serrations with the denticles on carnivorous dinosaur teeth recovered from the same bonebed, the researchers identified Tyrannosaurus rex as the most likely culprit. Other, less diagnostic marks may have been produced by crocodilians living in the same ecosystem.
Most of the tooth traces showed no associated bone remodelling, suggesting that they were inflicted at or after the time of death. The evidence therefore points more strongly towards scavenging than successful predation, although the two cannot always be distinguished. Weathering, bioerosion and characteristic fractures in fresh bone also indicate that the carcasses remained exposed for some time before burial and were probably exploited by theropods, crocodilians or both.
The World Spider Catalog currently recognises more than 54,000 living species of spider, and tens of thousands more may remain undiscovered. Every one of them possesses a pair of specialised mouthparts called chelicerae, each of which terminates in a fang. In most spiders, these fangs inject venom, although a few lineages have lost their venom glands and subdue their prey by other means.
Chelicerae are not, however, unique to spiders. They are the defining appendages of the Chelicerata, the major arthropod group that also includes scorpions, mites, ticks, harvestmen and horseshoe crabs. Scorpions possess small, pincer-like chelicerae near the mouth; their conspicuous claws are modified pedipalps, while their venom is delivered through a sting at the end of the tail. In other chelicerates, the same basic pair of appendages has been modified into pincers, piercing mouthparts or other feeding structures.
This shared anatomy strongly suggests that chelicerae were inherited from a common ancestor and subsequently modified as the different chelicerate lineages evolved. But what did the ancestral appendage look like, and when did it first appear?
Such questions inevitably involve gaps in the fossil record—gaps that creationists routinely misrepresent as evidence against evolution. Their argument depends upon portraying evolutionary theory as little more than a story constructed from fossils and therefore requiring an unbroken succession of specimens linking every species to its ancestors. Evolutionary theory requires no such thing. Fossilisation is an exceptionally rare event, and evolutionary relationships are reconstructed from multiple independent lines of evidence, including comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics and the fossils that happen to have survived.
Nevertheless, creationists will be disappointed to learn that another important part of this particular gap has now been bridged. A paper published in Nature by a Chinese-British research team led by Yu Liu and Lorenzo Lustri of Yunnan University describes the remarkably preserved anatomy of Urokodia aequalis, a small marine arthropod recovered from the famous Chengjiang fossil site in Yunnan Province, southern China. The rock formation containing it dates from approximately 518 million years ago.
According to newly published research in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (JMBA), Risso’s dolphins, Grampus griseus, around the British Isles appear to form a single, genetically connected population. At the same time, their mitochondrial DNA distinguishes them from dolphins sampled elsewhere in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, suggesting that the British population has experienced relatively little genetic exchange with more distant populations.
The research was conducted by an international team whose joint first authors were Nicola K. Hodgins, a visiting researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, and Ing Chen of National Taiwan Normal University, with Michael Krützen of the University of Zurich as corresponding author.
At first sight, describing the British dolphins as both a single population and genetically distinct might seem contradictory, but the two findings concern different geographical scales. Within British waters, the dolphins appear to interbreed freely enough to prevent significant regional genetic divisions from developing. Compared with populations farther afield, however, reduced gene flow has allowed the British population to acquire a distinctive genetic signature.
Figure EV1: Blood-stage immunofluorescence expression profile of PfSFA2 and ultrastructure expansion microscopy (U-ExM) of PfSFA1 localization.
(A) IFA of PfSFA2-smV5 expression across the asexual blood stages, stained with an anti-V5 antibody (green), an anti-PfGAP45 antibody (magenta), and Hoechst (DNA, blue). “Ring” stage with one nucleus, trophozoite stage (“Troph”) with 2, and several stages throughout schizogony, including segmentation, are shown with the number of nuclei. The minimum and maximum displayed values for the PfSFA2-V5 and PfGAP45 channels follow the “Reset” values of the first segmentation image. Scale bars: 2 µm. (B) U-ExM of PfSFA1-smV5 schizonts stained with an anti-V5 antibody (cyan), an anti-CrCen antibody (outer-CP, magenta), SYTOX (DNA, blue), and an NHS ester-conjugated dye (grayscale). Sub-z-slices of a 7-nuclei (top) and a 14-nuclei (bottom) schizont are maximally projected and shown to the left. Representative centriolar plaque regions are numbered and shown as insets to the right. Z-depth of each maximum projection is shown to the right. Scale bars: 5 µm for full schizont; 1 µm for inset.
Creationists insist that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved. If several interacting components are required for a system to function, they label it “irreducibly complex”; if genes encode proteins that perform a particular function, they call the DNA “complex specified information”. Both are then presented as evidence that the system must have been deliberately designed by an intelligent agent.
Curiously, however, this supposedly reliable design-detection method tends to be applied only to systems that creationists find impressive or beneficial. When comparable complexity enables a parasite to invade its host, evade its defences, reproduce rapidly and cause suffering and death, the inference to design is quietly abandoned. The parasite is instead blamed on “the Fall”, “genetic degeneration” or some other evidence-free theological excuse.
But a method that gives different answers according to whether its conclusion is theologically convenient is not a method at all. If molecular complexity, functional interdependence and genetically encoded organisation really demonstrate intelligent design, then they must do so just as reliably in a malaria parasite as in a bacterial flagellum, an eye or a blood-clotting system. And that would make them evidence not merely of intelligent design, but of intelligent malevolent design.
Two recent studies have now uncovered more of the extraordinarily elaborate machinery by which malaria parasites multiply. Instead of dividing into two daughter cells in the familiar way, Plasmodium parasites repeatedly copy their DNA and multiply their nuclei within a shared cell before producing numerous daughter parasites more or less simultaneously. The process must ensure that each viable daughter receives a nucleus and the cellular structures required to invade another host cell.
The Galápagos Islands occupy an iconic place in the history of evolutionary biology. The animals and plants Darwin encountered there during the voyage of HMS Beagle contributed important evidence to the theory he developed after returning to England: that living species are not fixed and immutable but are the products of a long historical process.
Darwin eventually realised that natural selection acting upon inherited variation could produce organisms that appeared designed for their environments, without foresight, planning or divine intervention. Individuals possessing variations that gave them an advantage in their particular circumstances tended to leave more descendants, causing those variations to become more common over successive generations.
Like the uniformitarian geologists—particularly Charles Lyell—Darwin recognised that the world as we see it is not a fixed unchangeable result of a single act of perfect creation, but is the product of natural processes operating over immense periods of time. The processes that shaped the past are still operating today and will continue to shape the future.
The familiar story that Darwin saw the Galápagos finches and immediately conceived his theory is, however, an oversimplification. During the voyage, he believed he had collected birds belonging to several different groups, including finches, grosbeaks, blackbirds, wrens and warblers. Only after the ornithologist John Gould examined the specimens in England did it become apparent that these apparently disparate birds belonged to a distinctive group of closely related species—what we now call Darwin’s finches, although taxonomically they are members of the tanager family.
Darwin then appreciated the evolutionary significance of their shared characteristics and striking differences. Their varied body sizes and beaks could be understood as modifications of a common ancestral form, associated with different diets and ecological niches throughout the archipelago. One ancestral population had diversified into numerous related forms: a process now known as adaptive radiation.
The standard creationist response is to dismiss Darwin’s finches as evidence for evolution because they remain recognisably finch-like. This objection depends upon the childish parody of evolution in which one species should turn suddenly into an entirely different and supposedly unrelated species. Such an event would not demonstrate evolution; it would contradict the branching process of descent with modification. Descendants necessarily remain related to their ancestors and inherit modified versions of ancestral structures.
This misconception lies behind such familiar creationist “Gotchas!” as “Why do we never see evolution happening?” and “Why has evolution stopped?” Evolution has not stopped. What creationists demand to see is not evolution but an instantaneous transformation that evolutionary biology neither predicts nor requires.
Darwin knew nothing of Mendelian genetics or DNA, of course. Modern genomic research has confirmed the common ancestry of his finches while revealing a history more complicated than a simple, neatly branching tree. Rapidly diverging lineages can retain genetic variants inherited from their common ancestor and can occasionally exchange genes through hybridisation.
Now, genomic research into a family of plants—the genus Scalesia, commonly known as the Galápagos giant daisies—has provided a botanical counterpart to Darwin’s finches. In only about one million years, the founding lineage has diversified into 15 recognised species occupying habitats ranging from dense, humid highland forests to hot, dry and exposed lowlands. They vary from low-growing shrubs to trees, with leaves ranging from large and unlobed to small, deeply lobed and intricately serrated.
My last blog post concerned a 210-million-year-old, gap-filling dinosaur from Zimbabwe that is helping palaeontologists to reconstruct the early evolution and dispersal of dinosaurs.
This post concerns another gap-filling fossil, although one from much closer to the present—just 30 million years ago. It is a remarkably complete skeleton of the early canid Mesocyon coryphaeus, one of the most complete pre-Ice Age canid skeletons yet found in North America.
This specimen fills a different sort of gap. Mesocyon coryphaeus, first named in 1879, is relatively common in the John Day Formation of Oregon, but it was previously known principally from skulls and teeth. Its postcranial skeleton—the bones behind the skull—had remained almost entirely unknown. The new specimen therefore fills an important anatomical gap in our understanding of how early canids moved, hunted and responded to the changing environments of Oligocene North America.
The fossil itself has had a curious history. It was collected during the late 1980s from land administered by the Bureau of Land Management near what is now the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Encased in a protective plaster jacket, it entered the monument’s collection after initially being mistaken for an oreodont—an extinct North American even-toed ungulate sometimes loosely described as resembling a mixture of sheep, camel and pig.
During the 1990s, the skull was separated from the surrounding rock for display, whereupon its teeth and cranial anatomy revealed that it was actually a canid. Park palaeontologists began exposing the remainder of the skeleton in 2012, but preparation continued intermittently for years. By the time the fossil was fully uncovered in 2022, more than 500 hours of painstaking preparation had been devoted to it.
University of Michigan palaeontologist Anne E. Kort, together with Jennifer Cavin of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, formally described the specimen in a paper published online in the Journal of Paleontology on 29 May 2026.
Known as JODA 3366, the specimen includes a complete cranium, an almost complete vertebral column in front of the sacrum, all the major limb bones and parts of both the forefeet and hindfeet. Only the tail and portions of the hands and feet are missing. It even preserves part of the baculum, or penis bone, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that the animal was male.
