Refuting Creationism - Scientists Discover What Caused Earth's Climate Cycle To Change A million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Rig used for obtaining core samples of seabed sediment

The pattern of glaciation and warmer spells changed about 1,000,000 years ago.

Deep ocean clues to a million-year-old Ice Age puzzle revealed in new study – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Like almost all of Earth's history, a sudden change in the cyclic pattern of climate change occurred in that long, pre-Creation period. To be precise, 700,000 to 1 million years ago the pattern of glaciation and interglacial warm spells changed from a 41,000 year cycle, due to changes in the degree of tilt in Earth's rotation (axial precession), to one of about 100,000 years with no obvious change in axial precession or external causes such as solar radiation. This is known to climatologists and geologists as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT)

Given the conviction of creationists that their putative designer god created Earth perfectly tuned for them to live on, it will probably be disturbing to learn that Earth's pattern of climate can change radically over the long term, and not caused by anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases but by perfectly natural processes that don't need the interference of a magic deity to explain them. On top of this all happening before they believe Earth was created out of nothing as a small flat planet with a dome over it, there is much here for creationists to ignore and for their cult to lie about.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Deluges - In Australia, 90,000 years Before 'Creation Week'

Pinnacles at Nambung National Park

Picture: Matej Lipar

Pinnacles at Nambung National Park

Iron nuggets in the Pinnacles unlock secrets of ancient and future climates - News at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth, Australia

For another o todays casual and incidental refutations of creationism, we have news about the climate in Western Australia, 90,000 years before creationists little god magicked up a small flat planet with a dome over it, according to the book of Bronze Age creation myths that creationists have mistaken for a science textbook.

Of course, when everything else about Earth's history occurred in the 99.9975% of its history that occurred before the mythical 'Creation Week', this will come as no surprise to anyone who is not functionally illiterate with the thinking ability of a slow 9year-old.

Refuting Creationism - Meteor Strikes Show Earth is NOT Perfectly Designed for (Human) Life!

A surface geology map of the proposed Massive Australian Precambrian-Cambrian Impact Structure.

Credit: Daniel Connelly

A potential 370-mile-wide crater in Australia, known as MAPCIS, may reshape our understanding of Earth’s geological history. Researchers found geological evidence, including shocked minerals and melt rock, suggesting a massive impact at the end of the Ediacaran period. (Artist’s concept.)

Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Australian crater could offer fresh insight into Earth’s geological history - VCU News - Virginia Commonwealth University

It's a sign of their parochial ignorance that creationists believe their magic designer created Earth to be a perfect planet for them to live on. This notion fails to take into account the fact that, for many people, especially in the technologically under-developed parts of the world, life can be a struggle against disease, natural disasters, a lack of water and famine.

It also fails to take into account the record of natural disasters of a cosmological origin such as meteor strikes that have caused sudden mass extinctions in the vast length of time before creationists believe Earth was 'perfectly' created as a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East.

Geologists from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), have identified the remnants of one such massive impact crater in the heart of Australia, measuring some 370 miles across. This impact is believed to have occurred toward the end of the Ediacaran period of Earth’s history, some 540 million years ago.

Refuting Creationism - Earth May Have had A Ring System 486 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An asteroid disintegrates under tidal forces as it approaches Earth

AI generated (ChatGPT4o)

Artist's impression.

Oliver Hull

Earth may have had a ring system 466 million years ago - Science

I know I'm always writing about things that happened before creationism's mythical 'Creation Week', but the problem is, almost everything that happened happened then. 99.9975% of Earth's history happened then, for example, and far more of the Universe's, since the Universe is some 3-4 times as old as Earth and an awful lot happened between the Big Bang and the formation of the sun and its planetary system.

And so, true to form, this is about the time 466 million years ago, when, according to the findings of three researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, led by Professor Andrew G. Thomkins, Earth had a ring system, somewhat like those of Jupiter and Saturn. They believe the ring was composed of the debris of a large asteroid that passed close enough to Earth to be broken up by gravitational tidal forces.

The result was a sudden plunge into an ice age and a period of intense bombardment with meteorites lasting millions of years and producing an otherwise difficult to explain pattern of impact craters.

Refuting Creationism - Climate Change In the Andes From 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Llaviucu in Cajas National Park in Ecuador.

Photos by Mark Bush

Bolivian tropical Andean foothills

CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

New study unveils 16,000 years of climate history in the tropical Andes | Brown University

Ask any creationist who is up to date with the latest dogmas as handed down by creation cult leaders, and they'll assure you their magic creator created Earth just a few thousand years ago and fine-tuned it for the existence of life (especially their life, because it had them in mind all along).

The reality, however, is very different: not only is Earth very much older by several orders of magnitude, but it is a dynamic and changing world, not the fixed, unchangeable world that 'fine-tuning' implies. It resembles a system in chaos, where a small change in one part can cause profound and unpredictable changes in another part. This is especially true of the weather, but is no less true of ocean currents, tectonic activity and the composition of the atmosphere.

As though to illustrate this, although refuting creationism was probably far from the minds of the scientists - that is a mere incidental of scientific facts as usual - a team of scientists led by climatologists from Brown University, Providence, RI, USA have analyzed the record of climate change in the Andes over the past 16,000 years (i.e. from 6,000 years before Creationist dogma says the Universe was magicked into existence out of nothing) and shown that major changes were brought about ultimately by the level of atmospheric \(\small \ce{\(\small \ce{CO2}\)}\).

Refuting Creationism - Interactions Between Earth’s Early Life Forms And The Environment - Over 500 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated image of what the ocean may have looked like during the Paleozoic era, around 500 million years ago.

AI-generated image of ancient phytoplankton in oxygen rich seawater.

Scientists Untangle Interactions Between the Earth’s Early Life Forms and the Environment over 500 million Years - College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University

One of creationism's problems is that, by insisting the Universe is only 10,000 years old or less, they place 99.9975% of Earth's history in that very long, pre-Creation period when, according to their mythology, there wasn't any history.

This, of course, is trivially easy to refute simply by finding evidence of something that happened during this period, and since almost all of history did, this is not much of challenge.

As I've remarked before, creationism is not a problem for science; science is a problem for creationism - which is why creationists spend almost all their time attacking science and lying about it to get new recruits, while all science need do is produce a few facts now and then - something it does incidentally, without even thinking about creationism.

Creationism in Crisis - How Homo Sapiens Helped Bonelli's Eagle Extend Its Range - 40,000 Years Before Creation Week

Bonelli's Eagle, Aquila fasciata

F. David Carmona

Bonelli's Eagle, Aquila fasciata

F. David Carmona

Early "Homo sapiens" facilitated the establishment of the Bonelli's eagle in the Mediterranean 50,000 years ago - Canal UGR

Not only is there no sign at all that the conversion of leading biologists to creationism's childish fairy tale in place of the scientific Theory of Evolution, that creationist cult leaders have been assuring their dupes is imminent - and has been for the last 50 years or so - it's as though they've never even heard of it. They still keep finding evidence of events that happened ten of thousand, even tens of millions of years before the Universe existed, according to the ludicrous creation myths they are supposedly about to adopt. And those events are frequently evidence of evolution or recent human history.

Imagine a serious, grown-up scientist who has been through university, with so much contrary information at his or her fingertips believing that account of magic creation 10,000 years ago written by ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists yet belonging to the creation cult requires fools to believe such an absurdity.

About 9 months ago while on holidat near Bezier, France, we were driving to Carcassonnes when, about a mile apart, we saw two majestic eagles that neither of us recognised. I now know they were Bonelli's eagles, and I probably have the activities of early Homo sapiens about 40,000 years ago to thank for them being there.

A study led by scientists from the University of Granada (UGR), Spain, shows how the activities of early Homo sapiens in the Iberian Peninsula, 40,000 years before creationists think their god created a universe consisting of a small, flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, may well have facilitated the expansion of the range of Bonelli's Eagle, Aquila fasciata, north of the Mediterranean Basin.

Creationism in Crisis - Dinosaurs Evolved Warm-Bloodedness 180 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a dromaeosaur, a type of feathered theropod, in the snow. This raptor was a relative of Velociraptor.

Davide Bonadonna/Universidade

First ‘warm-blooded’ dinosaurs may have emerged 180 million years ago | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Of all the different orders of living organisms' only mammals and birds today are warm-blooded, i.e., they are able to maintain a body temperature, within a certain range of ambient temperatures, by either producing heat or losing it, as necessary.

It might be thought that this indicates that the ability evolved in a common ancestor but of the ancestors of birds, the evidence suggests that many dinosaurs were cold-blooded like today's reptiles, and mammals are descendants of an earlier, pre-dinosaurian reptiles, so these similar processes for maintaining the body temperature may be more a matter of convergence than common ancestry.

Do mammals and birds use the same method to maintain their body temperature, and if not, how do they differ? Mammals and birds both maintain their body temperatures through endothermy, meaning they generate and regulate heat internally to keep their body temperatures stable. However, there are differences in how they achieve this due to variations in their physiology and behaviors. Here’s an overview of the similarities and differences:

Similarities in Temperature Regulation

1. Metabolic Heat Production:
   • Both mammals and birds generate heat through metabolic processes. This involves breaking down food to produce energy, with heat being a byproduct.
2. Insulation:
   • Both groups have evolved insulating layers to retain heat. Mammals have fur or hair, while birds have feathers. These layers trap air and provide a barrier against the cold.
3. Shivering Thermogenesis:
   • Both can generate additional heat through shivering, which involves rapid muscle contractions that produce heat.
4. Behavioral Adjustments:
   • Both mammals and birds engage in behaviors to manage their temperature, such as seeking shade or shelter, sunning themselves, or altering their activity levels based on the ambient temperature.

Differences in Temperature Regulation

1. Physiological Mechanisms:
   • Sweating and Panting: Mammals often use sweating and panting to cool down. Sweat glands secrete moisture that evaporates, taking heat away from the body. Dogs, for instance, pant to evaporate moisture from their respiratory tract. Birds, on the other hand, do not sweat. Instead, they often rely on a behavior called gular fluttering, where they rapidly move the skin in their throat to increase evaporation and cool down.
   • Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT): Many mammals, especially small ones and those living in cold environments, have brown adipose tissue that generates heat through non-shivering thermogenesis. Birds lack this type of tissue.
2. Heat Exchange Systems:
   • Countercurrent Heat Exchange: Birds have highly efficient countercurrent heat exchange systems in their legs and feet, which minimize heat loss. Blood vessels are arranged such that warm arterial blood warms the cooler venous blood returning to the body, conserving heat. While some mammals also use countercurrent heat exchange (such as in extremities), the systems are particularly pronounced and crucial in birds.
3. Basal Metabolic Rate:
   • Birds generally have higher basal metabolic rates compared to mammals of similar size, which means they produce more heat relative to their body size. This higher metabolic rate is partly due to the high energy demands of flight.
4. Hibernation and Torpor:
   • Many mammals can enter states of torpor or hibernation to conserve energy and reduce body temperature during periods of cold or food scarcity. While some birds also enter torpor, true hibernation is rare in birds. Instead, some birds migrate to warmer regions to avoid cold weather.

Behavioral Differences

1. Migration:
   • Migration is a key strategy for many birds to avoid extreme temperatures. While some mammals also migrate, it is far more common and pronounced in birds.
2. Nesting and Roosting:
   • Birds often build insulated nests or seek out warm roosting spots to maintain body temperature, especially during breeding seasons or cold nights. Mammals, on the other hand, may use burrows, dens, or other insulated shelters.

In summary, while both mammals and birds use endothermic processes to maintain their body temperatures, the specific physiological and behavioral strategies they employ can differ significantly due to their distinct evolutionary paths and physical characteristics.

A team of researchers led by University College London (UCL) and Universidade de Vigo, Spain, scientists has concluded that dinosaurs may have evolved warm-bloodedness as long ago as 180 million years ago, some 50 million years after the first dinosaurs evolved.

They concluded this after relating the evolutionary tree of the dinosaurs throughout the Mesozoic era to climate and geographical changes over the same time period and examining 1000 dinosaur fossils.

Their findings are the subject of an open access paper in the Cell Press journal, Current Biology. Their work is also explained in a UCL news release:

The ability to regulate body temperature, a trait all mammals and birds have today, may have evolved among some dinosaurs early in the Jurassic period about 180 million years ago, suggests a new study led by UCL and University of Vigo researchers.

In the early 20^th century, dinosaurs were considered slow-moving, “cold-blooded” animals like modern-day reptiles, relying on heat from the sun to regulate their temperature. Newer discoveries indicate some dinosaur types were likely capable of generating their own body heat but when this adaptation occurred is unknown.

The new study, published in the journal Current Biology, looked at the spread of dinosaurs across different climates on Earth throughout the Mesozoic Era (the dinosaur era lasting from 230 to 66 million years ago), drawing on 1,000 fossils, climate models and the geography of the period, and dinosaurs’ evolutionary trees.

The research team found that two of the three main groupings of dinosaurs, theropods (such as T. rex and Velociraptor) and ornithischians (including relatives of the plant eaters Stegosaurus and Triceratops), moved to colder climates during the Early Jurassic, suggesting they may have developed endothermy (the ability to internally generate heat) at this time. In contrast, sauropods, the other main grouping which includes the Brontosaurus and the Diplodocus, kept to warmer areas of the planet.

Previous research has found traits linked to warm-bloodedness among ornithischians and theropods, with some known to have had feathers or proto-feathers, insulating internal heat.

Our analyses show that different climate preferences emerged among the main dinosaur groups around the time of the Jenkyns event 183 million years ago, when intense volcanic activity led to global warming and extinction of plant groups. At this time, many new dinosaur groups emerged. The adoption of endothermy, perhaps a result of this environmental crisis, may have enabled theropods and ornithischians to thrive in colder environments, allowing them to be highly active and sustain activity over longer periods, to develop and grow faster and produce more offspring.

Dr Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, first author
Centro de Investigación Mariña
Departamento de Ecoloxía e Bioloxía Animal
Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain

And Department of Earth Sciences
University College London, London, UK.

Theropods also include birds and our study suggests that birds’ unique temperature regulation may have had its origin in this Early Jurassic epoch. Sauropods, on the other hand, which stayed in warmer climates, grew to a gigantic size at around this time – another possible adaptation due to environmental pressure. Their smaller surface area to volume ratio would have meant these larger creatures would lose heat at a reduced rate, allowing them to stay active for longer.

Dr Sara Varela, Co-author
Centro de Investigación Mariña
Departamento de Ecoloxía e Bioloxía Animal
Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain.

In the paper, the researchers also investigated if sauropods might have stayed at lower latitudes to eat richer foliage unavailable in colder polar regions. Instead, they found sauropods seemed to thrive in arid, savannah-like environments, supporting the idea that their restriction to warmer climates was more related to higher temperature and then to a more cold-blooded physiology. During that time, polar regions were warmer, with abundant vegetation. The Jenkyns event occurred after lava and volcanic gasses erupted from long fissures in the Earth’s surface, covering large areas of the planet.

This research suggests a close connection between climate and how dinosaurs evolved. It sheds new light on how birds might have inherited a unique biological trait from dinosaur ancestors and the different ways dinosaurs adapted to complex and long-term environmental changes.

Dr Juan L. Cantalapiedra, co-author
Departamento de Paleobiología
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC), Madrid, Spain.

The study involved researchers from UCL, University of Vigo, the University of Bristol and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, and received funding from the European Research Council, the Spanish Ministry of Research, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society.

Highlights

• Warm-blooded dinosaurs flourished in varied climates.
• Dinosaur groups adapted differently to climate, suggesting diverse thermophysiologies.
• Endothermy in theropods and possibly ornithischians evolved by the Early Jurassic
• Sauropod niche conservatism suggests higher thermal sensitivity and poikilothermy.

Graphical Abstract

Summary

A fundamental question in dinosaur evolution is how they adapted to long-term climatic shifts during the Mesozoic and when they developed environmentally independent, avian-style acclimatization, becoming endothermic.^1,2 The ability of warm-blooded dinosaurs to flourish in harsher environments, including cold, high-latitude regions,^3,4 raises intriguing questions about the origins of key innovations shared with modern birds,^5,6 indicating that the development of homeothermy (keeping constant body temperature) and endothermy (generating body heat) played a crucial role in their ecological diversification.⁷ Despite substantial evidence across scientific disciplines (anatomy,⁸ reproduction,⁹ energetics,¹⁰ biomechanics,¹⁰ osteohistology,¹¹ palaeobiogeography,¹² geochemistry,^13,14 and soft tissues^15,16,17), a consensus on dinosaur thermophysiology remains elusive.^{1,12,15,17,18,19} Differential thermophysiological strategies among terrestrial tetrapods allow endotherms (birds and mammals) to expand their latitudinal range (from the tropics to polar regions), owing to their reduced reliance on environmental temperature.²⁰ By contrast, most reptilian lineages (squamates, turtles, and crocodilians) and amphibians are predominantly constrained by temperature in regions closer to the tropics.²¹ Determining when this macroecological pattern emerged in the avian lineage relies heavily on identifying the origin of these key physiological traits. Combining fossils with macroevolutionary and palaeoclimatic models, we unveil distinct evolutionary pathways in the main dinosaur lineages: ornithischians and theropods diversified across broader climatic landscapes, trending toward cooler niches. An Early Jurassic shift to colder climates in Theropoda suggests an early adoption of endothermy. Conversely, sauropodomorphs exhibited prolonged climatic conservatism associated with higher thermal conditions, emphasizing temperature, rather than plant productivity, as the primary driver of this pattern, suggesting poikilothermy with a stronger dependence on higher temperatures in sauropods.

Chiarenza, Alfio Alessandro; Cantalapiedra, Juan L.; Jones, Lewis A.; Gamboa, Sara; Galván, Sofía; Farnsworth, Alexander J.; Valdes, Paul J.; Sotelo, Graciela; Varela, Sara
Early Jurassic origin of avian endothermy and thermophysiological diversity in dinosaurs Current Biology (2024) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.051

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Dinosaurs have always been a problem for creationists because their existence betrays the fact that the age of Earth as calculated from the Bible geneaolgies is wildly inaccurate by several orders of magnitude, but this paper piles on the agony by showign a clear evolutionary pathway from poikilothermy (cold-bloodedness) to homeothermy (warm-bloodedness) supported by geological, geographical and climatological evidence sometime around 180 million years before the biblical 'Creation Week'.

And it goes without saying that, being biologists, the authors of the paper show no sign of abandoning the TOE in favour of the childish notion of magic creation by an unproven supernatural entity. Indeed, they could scarcely be considered scientists if they included magic and superstition in their explanation for natural phenomena like creationists pseud-scientists are obliged to for contractual reasons.

---

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Creationism in Crisis - Saharan Rock Art From 8,000 Years Ago 'Missed' By the Biblical Genocidal Flood

Acacia forests in the Atbai Desert, near Bir al-Ajjami

Atbai Survey Project, Yale University

Ring tombs of likely Late Antique age (c. 1st Millennium CE) at Di’irabab

Atbai Survey Project, Yale University

New rock art discoveries in Eastern Sudan tell a tale of ancient cattle, the ‘green Sahara’ and climate catastrophe

From my own experience, the Sahara Dessert, at least the Tunisian part of it, is cold and wet!

At least that was what we experience a few years ago when we went there in early June, to avoid the heat of summer. That was a mistake, as Tunisia was experiencing one of the coldest Springs in living memory, when, at times, it felt like it was about to snow. We shivered at the Roman amphitheater at Al Jem where we were back on the coach within 20 minutes, asking for the heating to be turned on, and a trip to the Bardot Mosaic Museum in Tunis was spoilt by the rain.

But it was in the desert near Tozeur, dressed only in summer clothes, that we experienced a cold, wet Sahara, much as it may have been between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago when cattle herders were painting images of their cattle on the rocks at Atbai, east of Wado Halfa in Eastern Sudan. This period of Saharan 'greening' was when the West African subspecies of Rock dove (Columba livia lividor) managed to interbreed with a hybrid between C. rupestris and an Asian subspecies of C. livia, probably somewhere in the Sahara. And from that, probably all domestic and feral (town) pigeons are descended, as I described recently.

It was also where humans herded the cattle they had obtained from North African pastoralists, as described in the following article by Julien Cooper, Honorary Lecturer, Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Australia, reprinted here from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. His article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency, but the text is unaltered:

How Science Works - Tracking How Great Tits In An Oxfordshire Wood Are Responding To Climate Change

Wytham Wood, Oxfordshire, UK

Early morning, Wytham Wood

The great tits in this Oxford wood are adapting their breeding times as climate changes – here’s how

This article caught my eye because it concerns the birds in a wood which is local to me - Wytham Wood, near Oxford, to which I have licensed access. This is reputedly the most intensively studied area of woodland in the world, belonging, as it does, to Oxford University.

Wytham Woods form an iconic location that has been the subject of continuous ecological research programmes, many dating back to the 1940s. The estate has been owned and maintained by the University of Oxford since 1942. The Woods are often quoted as being one of the most researched pieces of woodland in the world, and their 1000 acres are designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The wooded parts of the Wytham Estate comprise ancient semi-natural woodland (dating to the last Ice Age), secondary woodland (dating to the seventeenth century), and modern plantations (1950s and 60s). The fourth key habitat is the limestone grassland found at the top of the hill. Other smaller habitats include a valley-side mire and a series of ponds.

The site is exceptionally rich in flora and fauna, with over 500 species of plants, a wealth of woodland habitats, and 800 species of butterflies and moths.

https://www.wythamwoods.ox.ac.uk/

Through intensive observation over successive years, researchers are able to measure changes in behaviour of species such as the Great Tit, Parus major with some of the best examples of observational biology in the form of research papers. For example, a few years ago a team of researchers showed that the British race of Great tits were diverging from their European relatives with changes in the beaks probably reflecting the fact that we in Britain provide feeding stations for birds to sustain them through the winter much more frequently than other Europeans, so the British Great tits are evolving so they can get the food in the bird feeders in British gardens.

In the following article, ecologist, David López Idiáquez, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology, University of Oxford, explains how their research is measuring how Great tits are responding to climate change. His article is reprinted here from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, with photographs from Internet sources:

Creationism in Crisis - Sudden Climate Change Recorded In Marine Mollusc Shells - From 8,400 Years Before Creationism's Global Genocide

Cantabrian Coast, Spain, where prehistoric people collected marine molluscs for food

Marine mollusc shells reveal how prehistoric humans adapted to intense climate change - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona
In an event known to geologists as the '8.2 Ka event', i.e. 8.2 Kilo anum (thousand years) event, a sudden flow of cold water melt-water from the North American lakes into the North Atlantic stopped the 'Atlantic Conveyer' from bringing warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up to the coast of Western Europe and with it warm, moist air. This even significantly and quite suddenly changed the climate to a colder, drier weather pattern which affected marine wildlife.

That event was subsequently recorded in the shells of the marine molluscs the people living along the Cantabrian Coast of Northern Spain gathered for food, disposing of the shells in midden tips, such as in the El Mazo cave in Asturias, Spain. The 8.2 Ka event also had a profound effect on the human societies as their food disappeared or migrated to more equitable areas.

If the creationists story of a global genocidal flood were true, then this record would have been swept away and destroyed, or at least buried under the predicted layer of silt and dead animal and plant remains that such a flood would have made inevitable. But there it is, looking for all the world like there never was a global flood and not so much as a centimeter of silt covering it.

The midden in the El Mazo cave was in use for about 1500 years, producing a continuous stratigraphic record with a very high chronological resolution, which is now the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports by a team of archaeologists led by Asier García Escárzaga, current researcher from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, together with Igor Gutiérrez Zugasti, from the Universidad de Cantabria (UC). The study was coordinated from the Universidad de La Rioja (UR) and the Max Planck Institute (Germany) alongside members of other academic centres (Max Planck Institute, University of Burgos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and University of Faro).

The study applies a multidisciplinary toolkit of archaeomalacological studies and stable oxygen isotope analyses to shell remains recovered from the shell midden site.

Creationism in Crisis - Revealing The Mysteries of Earth's Fourth Mass Extinction - 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Reconstruction of a Late Triassic ecosystem from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Published specimens and species preserved at Ghost Ranch were incorporated into the research team’s global ecological dataset.

Illustration: Victor O. Leshyk.

Skeleton of the early dinosaur Coelophysis bauri from the Late Triassic. The protracted restructuring of Early Jurassic terrestrial ecosystems coincided with the diversification of dinosaurs.

Image: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Mysteries of Earth’s ancient mass extinction event revealed

In that multi-billion year history of planet Earth, long before creationism's little god allegedly created a small, flat planet with a dome over it, and put living things on it, the real Earth had already had several mass extinctions when the ecosystem changed so radically and quickly that most species couldn't evolve fast enough to survive.

This give the lie to creationist claims that Earth is finely-tuned for life because, quite frankly, very few of the species that have evolved on it last more than a few million years before being killed off by one catastrophe or another that any omniscient deity worthy of the description could and should have foreseen and planned for.

The fourth of those mass extinctions occurred at the end of the Triassic period when a dramatic rise in greenhouse gasses due to volcanic activity led to rapid global warming and a significant shift in the planet’s biosphere, ending the Triassic period and launching the Jurassic.

The parallel with today when a rise in greenhouse gasses has been caused by industrial pollution and burning fossil fuels is striking.

Now a new insight into this mass extinction has been revealed by researchers from the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, using a novel "ecospace framework" method that categorizes animals beyond just their species. It accounts for ecological roles and behaviors — from flying or swimming predators to grazing herbivores and from ocean seafloor invertebrates to soil-dwelling animals on land.

As the press release from UCSDornsife explains:

Creationism in Crisis - How Mindless Evolution Took A Giant Ape To Extinction

A reconstruction of Gigantopithecus blacki.

Image: Garcia / Joannes-Boyau

The Extinction of the Giant Ape--A Long-standing Mystery Solved--Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology

Gigantopithecus blacki, the largest hominoid that ever lived.

Limestone karst landscape in Chongzuo, southern China. The Gigantopithecus sites are located in caves in the steep-sided walls of the mountains. The mountain in the center of the picture is Mulan Mountain. The entrance of Hejiang Cave (#16 in Figure 2) is about three-quarters down from the main peak.

Zhang Y and Harrison T.(2017)

Gigantopithecus blacki was the largest known member of the Hominidae. It lived in what is now southern China but went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, leaving only around 2000 fossilised teeth and four jawbones as evidence of its existence. Creationists will need to ignore that fact that this means the entire species lived and went extinct some 250,000 years before 'Creation Week' when they believe the Universe, Earth and all living things were magicked out of nothing.

The reason for its extinction remained a mystery until now, when a team of researchers from Chinese, Australian and American universities have shown that extinction was almost certainly caused by climate change which deprived it of its highly specialised food - tree bark.

The story of its evolution and eventual extinction illustrates the unplanned and mindless nature of evolution by Natural Selection which has no mechanism for anticipating, let alone planning for a major event like climate change causing forest to become grasslands. There is no Plan B because there is not even a Plan A. The large size of Gigantopithecus was probably related to its diet of tree bark, which can be deduced from its teeth and jaw. A large gut being needed to digest, with the aid of bacteria and other microorganisms, a high-cellulose diet. And a large body needs a lot of food to sustain it. Compare the size of the wholly vegetarian gorilla with that of the more omnivorous chimpanzees.

The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature and explain it in a news release from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences:

Creationism in Crisis - The Periodic Greening Of The Sahara In That Vast Expanse of 'Pre-Creation' History.

Sahara Desert At the present time

Tassili N’Ajjer plateau, Algeria.
A once fertile savannah with lakes and rivers.

The Sahara Desert used to be a green savannah – new research explains why

Having visited the Sahara Desert in April about 10 years ago, I can assure readers that it is not the hot, dry place of repute but can be cold and wet, at least in the Tunisian part. It was so cold with a fine drizzle, that, shivering in a t-shirt, I offered to buy the thick, hooded duffle coat a local troglodyte guide was wearing, but he quoted me 5000 dinars (about £400) with a knowing twinkle in his eye. I elected to shiver until I got back on the coach and the driver turned the heating on. Yes, there are troglodytes in Tunisia!

There have been times in the past when rain in the Sahara was not just freak weather in Spring to annoy tourists, but the norm in much of the year, so much so that the Sahara was mixed savannah and scrub with lakes and rivers, especially the western part.

Readers may recall how I mentioned the periodic greening of the Sahara in my article about the evolution of rock doves and feral pigeons. Briefly, a species of dove resident in West Africa crossed the Sahara during one such period when there was forest, grassland and water in place of sand. Then when the Sahara became desert the two populations diverged and the one which had made it as far as the Middle East hybridized with a resident related dove. This hybrid quickly became the normal form of the rock dove north and east of the Sahara and diversified further into several subspecies, one of which was domesticated and selectively bred to produce lots of different varieties. Some of these eventually reverted to a feral existence and became the ubiquitous town pigeon with a very different lifestyle and habitat to the original rock dove.

This process of African species moving into and across the Sahara during these periods of greening, and then becoming isolated from the African population, is known as the Saharah Pump and accounts for some of the sub-Saharan African species having a closely related counterpart in North Africa and Eurasia.

And this process has been going on since about 8 million years before creationists think Earth was created and may account for the migration of humans out of Africa some 40-50,000 years ago. More recently, however, there was certainly a population of humans living in a green and fertile Sahara up to at least 11,000 years ago (i.e., at least 1,000 years before 'Creation Week'. We know this because they left a record in rock carvings at Tassili N’Ajjer plateau in present-day Algeria, which show us some of the animals that lived there too.

These periods of greening have occurred approximately every 21,000 years and now two geoscientists from Helsinki University, Finland together with colleagues at Birmingham and Bristol universities, UK., have developed a climate model that explains how the climate changed so regularly and so radically. They have published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications. One of them, Edward Armstrong of Helsinki University, has also written an article about their research in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - How Elephants Got Their Trunks and Tusks 20 Million Years Before 'Creation Week' - No Magic Required

Artist's impression of Platybelodon grangeri

Credit: Tim Bertelink via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Platybelodon grangeri (artist's impression)

How shifting climates may have shaped early elephants’ trunks | For the press | eLife

As expected of scientific research papers, this one deals with events that occurred in that vast expanse of time before creationists think Earth was created, when 99.97% of Earth's history occurred.

This one, published open access in eLife, explains how the ancestors of modern elephants and their recently extinct relatives, the mammoths, got their long flexible trunks and used them for their unique feeding method.

The paper by lead author, Chunxiao Li, and colleagues from the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and including Burt Wolff of the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA and Fajun Sun of the Department Environmental Science & Technology, University of Maryland, MD, USA, "combines multiple analyses to reconstruct feeding behaviours in the extinct longirostrine elephantiforms - elephant-like mammals characterised by elongated lower jaws and tusks."

It seems that, as they grew larger, for reasons not yet fully understood, but possibly to give a larger 'vat' in which to ferment their high-cellulose diet, these early ancestors of the elephants had to evolve a longer jaw to reach the grasses and shrubs on which they grazed. The trunk extended as part of this process of facial elongation. This in turn created the opportunity for the end of the truck to play a part in holding the plants as they were cut off by the incisor teeth at the end of the lower jaw. This was more of an advantage in the open grasslands that Platybelodon inhabited, so, when climate change meant loss of habitat and eventual extinction for the two related gomphotheres, Platybelodon's prehensile trunk gave it enough advantage to survive.

A press release by eLife explains the research and its significance for understanding how elephants got their trunks:

Creationism in Crisis - The Diverse Landscape Of 'Pre-Creation' Europe

Illustrations by Brennan Stokkerman

Fig. 4.
Palaeoartistic reconstructions of Last Interglacial landscapes in the European temperate forest biome, consistent with our pollen-based estimates of vegetation structure.

Typical Last Interglacial fauna are shown, such as the extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), an extinct rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis), and aurochs (Bos primigenius, the extinct wild form of contemporary domestic and feral cattle), alongside common extant species: fallow deer (Dama dama), a great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major), a European robin (Erithacus rubecula), and greylag geese (Anser anser). (Top left) Early-temperate period: Light woodland, including a mix of taller trees and the shrub hazel (Corylus avellana), and grass-dominated open vegetation. (Top right) Early-temperate period: Open, grassy vegetation interspersed with light woodland and bordering closed forest with shade-tolerant trees. (Bottom left) Late-temperate period: Light woodland, denser forest with frequent hornbeam (Carpinus betulus), and some open vegetation (front). (Bottom right) Late-temperate period: Open grass- and sedge-dominated vegetation with free-standing deciduous oaks (Quercus robur), with more closed tree stands in the background.

Illustrator: Brennan Stokkermans.
Pearce, E. A.; Mazier, F.; Normand, S., et al. (2023) (CC BY 4.0)

Europe was not covered by dense forest before the arrival of modern humans

Researchers led by Elena A. Pearce of the Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, have looked again at the evidence for the flora and fauna of Europe during the last interglacial period (130,000 -150,000 years ago) and believe they have shown that the previous assumption that Europe was covered in dense woodland prior to the arrival of modern human, may be wrong. Europe was, instead, "full of variation. Importantly, the landscapes harboured large amounts of open and semi-open vegetation with shrubs, light-demanding trees and herbs alongside stands of tall-growing shade trees."

When was the last interglacial period in Europe and what caused it? The last interglacial period in Europe occurred during the Pleistocene epoch, specifically the Eemian interglacial. The Eemian interglacial is estimated to have occurred roughly between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago. It was a relatively warm period when temperatures were higher than during the subsequent Last Glacial Maximum.

The primary cause of glacial-interglacial cycles, including the Eemian interglacial, is believed to be variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt, collectively known as Milankovitch cycles. These variations influence the amount and distribution of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface. The interplay of these orbital parameters results in periodic changes in climate, leading to alternating glacial and interglacial periods.

During interglacial periods, such as the Eemian, temperatures were warmer, and ice sheets and glaciers retreated. This warmer climate allowed for the expansion of forests and the development of different ecosystems compared to the colder glacial periods. It's important to note that natural climate variability, driven by factors like Milankovitch cycles, played a significant role in past climate changes, but contemporary climate change is also influenced by human activities, particularly the emission of greenhouse gases.

The team arrived at their conclusion after examining pollen grains from soil samples taken from large parts of Europe.

Creationism in Crisis - Disastrous Sea Level And Climate Changes - 385 Million Years Ago.

The Malvinoxhosan biota were a group of marine animals that thrived in cooler waters

2023-10 - Ancient sea level and climate changes led to major extinctions around South Africa - Wits University

A planet designed by a loving, omniscient designer would be stable and not subject to periodic bouts of mass extinction because the life on it couldn't cope with a massive environmental change.

And yet new research by Dr Cameron Penn-Clarke from the University of the Witwatersrand and Professor David Harper from Durham University has shown that a catastrophic environmental change in the Early Devonian caused the mass extinction of the Malvinoxhosan biota. This was in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before the Universe was created out of nothing by magic, according to creationists.

The term 'Malvinoxhosan biota' foxed ChatGPT3.5:

Creationism in Crisis - Why Earth is Fine Tuned for Extinction

An arid and uninhabitable planet awaits us - in 250 million years.

September: Nature Geoscience extreme heat | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists like to imagine that Earth is fine-tuned for life. This belief depends on the parochial ignorance of the creationist of course, because they will be oblivious of the fact that, cozy though their small bit of the planet might be, most of it is uninhabitable by humans without specialist equipment, and even cloths and houses are required in the temperate areas. Human life would be impossible without modern technology in the oceans, deserts, arctic waste, the tops of high mountains or just a few thousand feet above the surface of the planet (this is why modern aircraft that fly at 30-60,000 feet need to be pressurised).

But a planet that is fine-tuned for life would also have an infinite life-span, not a time-limited one where the life-time is limited by entirely natural processes, such as plate tectonics and the solar cycle. In fact, the life span of Earth is a mere blink on a cosmic time-scale that is measured by the life of suns.

Long before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows up the inner planets at the end of its life, shortly before becoming a super nova and blowing away the outer planets, Earth's continents will have coalesced into another single super-continent, reminiscent of Pangea, and the climate will have made life untenable for most species of mammal, according to researcher at Bristol University.

The resulting increase in volcanic rifting and out-gassing, combined with 'continentality' and an increase in solar energy output, will result in a 'wet-bulb' temperature of >35^oC and a 'dry bulb' temperature of >40^oC - temperatures at which mammalian thermoregulation fails, leading to death in about 6 hours.

The team's findings are published open access in Nature Geoscience and explained in a Bristol University press release: