Refuting Creationism - A Reptile That Looks Like A Cross Between a Greyhound And A Crocodile - From 215 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Galahadosuchus jonesi n. gen. n. sp. The morphology of regions of the body that are not currently known for Galahadosuchus jonesi (i.e., not preserved in NHMUK PV R 10002) is inferred from comparison with Terrestrisuchus gracilis (Spiekman et al., 2023, 2024) due to the high degree of morphological similarity between these two taxa. Scale bar represents 100 mm.

Artwork by M. Dempsey.

New species of ancient crocodile named in honour of Welsh school teacher | Natural History Museum

A newly named, 215-million-year-old species of crocodile-like reptile, discovered in Gloucestershire, UK, and described in The Anatomical Record, looks rather like the sort of creature creationists imagine a transitional fossil should be: half of one modern species and half of another from an unrelated group. That, of course, is the ridiculous parody of evolution that the creationist cult teaches its followers to believe is what those crazy scientists think the Theory of Evolution describes.

In reality, this discovery is nothing of the sort. What it actually reveals is a species that raises interesting questions about the environmental pressures that shaped its evolution. It was a long-legged, fast-running crocodylomorph, resembling a greyhound with scales and a crocodile’s head and jaws. It probably lived its entire life on land, using its speed to hunt small animals. That, in turn, suggests its prey were also fast-moving, rather like the relationship between cheetahs and gazelles, which have co-evolved speed in an evolutionary arms race: one to catch fast prey, the other to escape a fast predator. It is exactly the sort of process that refutes the notion of intelligent design, yet is entirely predictable under the Theory of Evolution by natural selection.

This animal lived in what was then an area of high ground overlooking hot, arid plains during the Late Triassic. That was a period of major diversification, brought to an end by a mass extinction caused by intense volcanic activity. It was followed by the Jurassic, so comparing animals from before and after that extinction event can help us understand how life responded to those dramatic environmental changes. Among the creatures that survived were the ancestors of the dinosaurs, and later, birds and mammals.

The research team, led by PhD student Ewart H. Bodenham of University College London, with colleagues from UCL, the Natural History Museum, London, and the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany, carried out a detailed analysis of this and other fossils from fissure deposits on either side of the Bristol Channel, in South Wales and South-West England. They concluded that this specimen represented a species new to science.

Unintelligent Design - Men Lose Their Y Chromosome - And Why It Matters

Men lose their Y chromosome as they age. Scientists thought it didn’t matter – but now we’re learning more

Creationists who point to the supposed 'perfection' of the human body as evidence of intelligent design have yet more evidence to ignore if they are to retain that belief. In my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, I listed many of the conditions and vulnerabilities from which humans suffer precisely because our bodies are the products of evolution, not intelligent design. Viewed objectively, rather than through the rose-tinted lens of creationism, the human body is one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design and in favour of evolution.

We now have additional evidence of this. As men age, increasing numbers of their cells lose the Y chromosome — the chromosome that males normally possess alongside a single X chromosome, while females usually have two X chromosomes. It is becoming increasingly clear that this loss is implicated in several diseases that affect men disproportionately, including cardiovascular disease, Parkinsonism, and some cancers such as ocular melanoma. Together, these help to explain men's lower life expectancy.

According to the ID creationist paradigm, the human body is the supreme achievement of their god's design. So, if we assume, as they do, that this designer is the omniscient and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur'an, then this male-specific vulnerability must either have been intended or be the accidental result of incompetence and lack of foresight. Traditionally, of course, ID creationists try to absolve their designer of responsibility for such flaws by blaming them on some other entity supposedly capable of thwarting the divine plan, with humans bearing the guilt because of the 'sin' of a mythical ancestral couple. This merely exposes Intelligent Design for what it really is: not science, as the Discovery Institute and its allies insist, but biblical literalism in a lab coat, forced to rely on fundamentalist superstition to explain away the failures of its own claims when the facts are examined.

How scientists are discovering this age-related loss of the Y chromosome in men's cells, and the damaging effects it has on male health, is the subject of an article in The Conversation by the distinguished geneticist Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Australia. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, some background information on the origins and function of the Y chromosome:

Refuting Creationism - How We Know Evolution Is Not Goal-Centred - Winged Dinosaurs That Couldn't Fly

Anchiornis huxleyi

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Anchiornis huxleyi Beijing specimen BMNHC PH828.

By ★Kumiko★ from Tokyo, Japan - Dinosaur Feather, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

TAU research about dinosaurs sheds light on the evolution of flight - American Friends of Tel Aviv University American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Because many creationists never seem to have progressed beyond the teleological thinking typical of toddlers, they assume that everything must have agency and must be directed towards some intended end.

That habit of mind was highlighted a few years ago in a study showing that the persistence of teleological thinking into adulthood is associated with the cognitive style underlying both creationism and conspiracism.

This goes a long way towards explaining why creationists so often invoke conspiracies to explain away the evidence against their beliefs, and why debating them can resemble arguing with toddlers who know little, understand less, and yet imagine themselves in possession of profound truths.

Any serious study of evolution, however, quickly shows that there is no plan, no foresight, and no directing intelligence. Evolution has no destination in mind. The only “direction” it has is whatever changing environments impose on it, favouring traits that happen, at any given time, to work best and leave the most descendants.

A recent study by a team led by Dr Yosef Kiat of the School of Zoology at Tel Aviv University’s George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, working with colleagues in China and the United States, provides a striking illustration of that point. Their paper, published on 21 November 2025 in Communications Biology, suggests that some feathered dinosaurs in the anchiornithid lineage of pennaraptoran theropods may have evolved the ability to fly, only to lose it again when environmental change made flight no longer advantageous.

In other words, evolution did not move steadily towards some grand objective. It produced flight when flight was useful, and abandoned it when it was not. Feathers, which may briefly have served an aerodynamic role in these animals, appear then to have reverted primarily to their earlier functions of insulation and temperature regulation.

The key evidence comes from moulting patterns. In living flying birds, feathers are moulted symmetrically so that the bird can retain its ability to fly. In flightless birds, by contrast, moulting can be irregular and apparently disorganised. By examining fossils of these dinosaurs from Chinese deposits, the researchers identified this latter pattern in animals that otherwise appear to have possessed anatomical adaptations for flight.

The Fallible Bible - How We KNow The Bible's Is Not The Inerrant Word Of A Creator God

Leopard Gecko, Eublepharis macularius

Researchers discover leopard gecko produces females at cooler incubation temperatures and mostly males at warmer ones. This clear sex-determination pattern of leopard gecko has established it as a key model for studying environmental effects on development.

Credit: Professor Shinichi Miyagawa from Tokyo University of Science, Japan.

New study clarifies how temperature shapes sex development in leopard gecko | EurekAlert!

Bible literalists insist that every word in the Bible is true and without error, yet the text itself contains statements that cannot all be true at the same time, so at least one of them must be false*. The Bible also contains factually incorrect statements, such as the assertion in Genesis 6:19 and 7:15–16 that males and females of every ‘kind’ were brought onto the Ark, reflecting the same assumption found in Genesis 1:27 that living creatures were created as male and female.

We now know, unlike the authors of Genesis, that not all species exist as fixed male–female pairs. There are many examples of hermaphrodite creatures that are both male and female; some species that are entirely female, such as the New Mexico whiptail lizard and the marbled crayfish; many aphids and some beetles such as the vine weevil; and species that can change sex during their lifetime, such as certain fish. And, as a recent paper in the journal Developmental Biology by a team of researchers led by Professor Shinichi Miyagawa from the Department of Biological Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, Japan, shows, there are also species such as the leopard gecko, Eublepharis macularius, in which sex is not determined by inherited chromosomes at all but by the temperature at which the embryo develops in the egg.

In other words, in some species the difference between male and female is not fixed at conception at all, but depends on something as mundane as the temperature of the nest.

The team showed that there is a discrete window, known as the temperature-sensitive period, during which temperature triggers temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), activating specific sets of genes that control the development of either testes or ovaries, thereby determining the sex of the developing embryo.

Refuting Creationism - Another of Those 'Non-Existant' Missing LInks - 90 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Alnashetri cerropoliciensis based on a reconstruction by Gabriel Díaz Yantén, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro

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Alnashetri cerropoliciensis

Illustration provided by Gabriel Díaz Yantén
Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

Analysis of 90-million-year-old fossil rewrites history | University of Minnesota

Many creationists believe the Theory of Evolution is primarily about fossils and that it predicts every stage in the evolution of a species should be present in the fossil record. From this misunderstanding comes the claim that any “missing link” falsifies the entire theory. The fact that palaeontologists have discovered yet another of those supposed “missing links” will therefore cause another bout of cognitive dissonance between what reality shows and what creationists insist reality ought to look like.

Creationists also traditionally deny that dinosaurs are evidence of an ancient Earth and of a mass extinction event 66 million years ago. Instead, they claim dinosaur fossils are normally found in sedimentary rocks because they were killed and buried during the Biblical Flood. This specimen, however, was rapidly buried and preserved by an advancing sand dune — something that is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a catastrophic global flood.

Its discovery was announced in a paper in Nature by a team co-led by University of Minnesota researcher Peter Makovicky and Argentinian colleague Sebastián Apesteguía. The paper describes the discovery of the complete skeleton of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a 90-million-year-old small dinosaur that fills an important gap in our understanding of where this group of dinosaurs originated and how they spread across the world.

Alnashetri belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as the alvarezsaurids, later members of which were characterised by their short, stubby arms and small teeth. Alnashetri, however, had longer arms and larger teeth, yet it was one of the smallest adult dinosaurs ever found in South America, weighing only about 4 pounds (around 2 kg). These primitive features and its small size show that the group became small before evolving their characteristic reduced arms and teeth. At 90 million years old, the fossil also suggests that the group originated on the supercontinent Pangaea before it fully fragmented, meaning their later global distribution reflects continental drift rather than migration across oceans.

Refuting Creationism - How The Centromere Evolved

Abstract digital DNA Helix. Purple elements represent evolutionary changes in DNA.

AI-generated image

26-02-19Uncovering evolution at the center of cell division | Max Planck Institute

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A paper recently published in Nature by a research team led by Andrea Musacchio, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, and Jef Boeke from the NYU Grossmann School of Medicine, refutes a number of creationism's sacred dogmas. It shows how evolution at the cellular level progresses through intermediate stages and how new genetic information can arise and be repurposed. It also shows how complex specified information can evolve naturally by a Darwinian process.

The paper goes some way towards solving the ‘centromere paradox’. This is the observation that although the mechanism of cell replication, which is common to all eukaryotic cells, is highly conserved, the centromere — the specialised point on a chromosome to which proteins attach and pull the chromosomes apart during cell division — appears to mutate freely. This results in a wide variety of centromeres, ranging from large, repeat-rich centromeres in some species to the tiny, minimalist ‘point centromeres’ of yeast.

The team showed that the tiny centromere in yeast evolved through intermediate stages and began as a ‘jumping gene’, or retrotransposon — an essentially parasitic chunk of DNA that can relocate within a chromosome, thereby creating new genetic material. In yeast, this appears to have been repurposed by evolution to create the precise minimalist centromere — an example of what William A. Dembski would call complex specified information and designate as evidence for a creator.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rocked By Wrinkles In The Atlas Mountains Of Morocco

Dadès Valley and the Atlas Mountains

Photo by Hans Peter Schaefer, Hps-poll
http://www.reserv-a-rt.de/, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Mats of chemosynthetic bacteria forming below the layer of turbidity.

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Signs of Ancient Life Turn Up in an Unexpected Place | GSA News Release 26-02

Geologists led by Dr Rowan Martindale of the University of Texas at Austin, working with colleagues including Stéphane Bodin of Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered strange crenulated structures in rocks in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco that reveal something unexpected about microscopic life 160 million years ago. Their findings are published today in the journal Geology. The evidence, plain to see in the rocks, should not exist if creationist mythology had any basis in fact.

The reality is that, during that vast span of Earth’s history before creationists imagine their god created the small flat world with a dome over it described in the Bible, something unusual was happening deep within marine sediments that later became the Atlas Mountains. Bacteria were forming microbial mats at least 160 metres below the sea floor, far beyond the reach of sunlight.

That alone is remarkable, but what makes the discovery particularly unusual is the distinctive ripple-like crenulations the mats produced. Structures like these are normally associated with microbial mats forming on the surface of undisturbed sediment. Such mats were common before the Cambrian Period, more than 540 million years ago, when complex mobile animals had not yet evolved to burrow through and mix the seafloor. In those earlier times, microbial mats could grow across the sediment surface and preserve delicate textures and ripples.

However, once burrowing animals proliferated during the Cambrian, the upper layers of marine sediment began to be constantly churned up in a process known as bioturbation. This destroyed microbial mats and prevented the formation of the characteristic surface patterns they once produced. For the last half-billion years these textures have therefore been extremely rare in normal marine sediments, appearing today only in limited environments such as very shallow waters where photosynthetic microbial mats can still establish themselves.

Yet the Moroccan rocks contain similar crenulated structures formed about 160 million years ago—hundreds of millions of years after burrowing animals had transformed the seafloor. The explanation is that these features formed not at the surface but deep within the sediment, where chemosynthetic microbes were able to grow undisturbed by burrowing organisms. Instead of relying on sunlight and organic debris, these microbes obtained energy from chemical reactions involving minerals in the sediment itself.

Far from supporting creationist assertions that life cannot arise from inorganic sources, chemosynthetic microbes have been exploiting chemical energy from rocks and minerals for billions of years.

Refuting Creationism - A Relative Of Crocodiles That Only Walked on Two Legs As An Adult - 200 Million Years Ago

Artist's reconstruction of Sonselasuchus cedrus in its environment in what is now Petrified Forest National Park, 215 million years ago.

Artwork by Gabriel Ugueto.

“Peculiar” ancient ancestor of the crocodile started life on four legs in adolescence before it began walking on two - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In Greek mythology, Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and so saved the city of Thebes. The riddle asked, “What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answered “Man” (crawling as a baby, walking upright as an adult and using a walking stick in old age.)

Of course, that myth is no less plausible than the Hebrew origin myths that creationists regard as literal history but, in a way, Oedipus was lucky. Not only did the Sphinx allow the stretch of regarding a walking stick as a leg (for poetic licence?), but the riddle did not stop at two legs, as there are very many bipedal species, and at least one went on four legs in infancy.

Researchers, Elliott Armour Smith from the University of Washington Department of Biology and Professor Christian A. Sidor of the Washington University Burke Museum, have just published the results of a study in the Journal of Paleontology showing that an ancient relative of crocodiles, the poodle-sized Sonselasuchus cedrus, probably began life as a quadruped and later had to learn to walk upright because of different growth patterns in different bones.

This creates a problem for creationists, not so much because other mythologies contain legends such as the riddle of the Sphinx that, treated as a metaphor, describe the human condition better than any of the implausible tales in the Bible, but because the myths it does contain preclude learning any of the fascinating history of life on Earth that requires a realistic timeline running into hundreds of millions, even billions of years. These peculiar crocodiliform shuvosaurids lived between about 225 and 201 million years ago and were contemporaneous with the bipedal ornithomimid dinosaurs that eventually gave rise to birds.

The interesting question then—and something creationists are precluded from considering—is what about the earthly environment made bipedalism such an advantage that it evolved independently in two distantly related groups of reptiles?

This conclusion comes from the examination of 950 Sonselasuchus fossils unearthed in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park—a fossil site which has yielded more than 3,000 fossil bones since 2014.

Creationism in Crisis - An Early Relative of the First Primates From North America - 65.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Purgatorius

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Artists impression of Purgatorius unio from Late Paleocene North America

By Nobu Tamura - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Miniscule fossil discovery reveals fresh clues into the evolution of the earliest-known relative of all primates - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

Scientists have recently announced the discovery of a small tooth in the Corral Bluffs, in the Denver basin, Colorado that shows one of the group of early mammals from which primates later emerged probably evolved in North America. For Creationists keen to find a reason to dismiss science and the evidence it keeps revealing showing creationism is nothing but an evidence free superstition, this is eerily reminiscent of what they regard as the 'Nebraska Man' hoax.

The supposed hoax was nothing of the sort and was, in reality a creationists lie intended to mislead people, perpetrated by two evangelical Christian con-men, Hank Hanegraff and Grant Jeffrey, who falsely proclaimed it to have been a failed attempt to trick people into believing in evolution - a trick that still has some success on creationists, notorious as they are for failing to fact-check their claims.

Creationists like to pretend that palaeontology is little more than a catalogue of embarrassing mistakes and hoaxes. In reality, of course, the history of palaeontology shows the opposite: new discoveries steadily refine and improve our understanding of life’s history, filling gaps in the fossil record and clarifying evolutionary relationships. A recent discovery reported in a press release by Taylor & Francis and described in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is a good example of this process at work.

The discovery concerns a few minuscule fossil teeth belonging to Purgatorius, a tiny, shrew-sized mammal that lived about 65.9 million years ago, shortly after the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Purgatorius is widely regarded as one of the earliest known relatives of the primate lineage—the group that eventually gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. Fossils of this animal were previously known mainly from Montana and parts of western Canada, but the new finds from the Denver Basin in Colorado extend its known range several hundred miles further south.

According to the researchers, this discovery helps fill an awkward gap in the early fossil record of primate relatives. Slightly younger species appear in the southwestern United States about two million years later, leaving palaeontologists wondering why earlier forms seemed confined to the north. The Colorado fossils suggest that these early primate relatives probably spread southwards fairly rapidly after the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous Period, diversifying as forests recovered in the aftermath of the impact.

However, before creationists begin sharpening their pencils in preparation for another round of “Nebraska Man” rhetoric, it is important to understand what this discovery does—and does not—show. The paper is not claiming that primates themselves evolved in North America, nor that this tiny mammal was a direct ancestor of humans. Purgatorius is better described as a stem relative of primates—an early member of the broader evolutionary group from which primates eventually emerged. In other words, it sits near the base of the evolutionary tree leading to primates, not within the modern primate group itself.

What the discovery really demonstrates is something far more typical of evolutionary biology: as new fossils are found, the geographical distribution and timing of early evolutionary lineages become clearer. In this case, a few teeth barely larger than grains of rice are helping palaeontologists reconstruct how the earliest primate relatives spread across ancient North America in the chaotic ecological world that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - How Sex Selection Between Homo sapiens And Neanderthals Played A Part In Human Evolution

Genetic inheritance in Homo sapiens/Neanderthal hybrids

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How ancient attraction shaped the human genome | Penn Today

What creationist mythology cannot account for is the presence not just of Neanderthals, but of traces of their DNA in almost all people who are not of recent African ancestry.

So imagine the mental gymnastics they will need to perform to cope with the news that new genomic research by members of Sarah Tishkoff’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania has shown how that most Darwinian of evolutionary mechanisms—sexual selection—is responsible for how Neanderthal DNA is distributed in the Homo sapiens genome.

It is enough to send any dedicated creationist into deep denial, with cries of foul and accusations that the scientists involved are somehow deceiving the public—anything to avoid accepting the fact that their primitive beliefs are wrong, even to the extent of betraying the uncomfortable reality that their professed ‘faith’ often functions as a front for a political agenda far removed from the basic teachings they claim to defend.

The findings of the University of Pennsylvania team were recently published in the journal Science.

This subject strikes a particular chord with me because, in my novel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora—the mother of the central character, Shana—has a Neanderthal partner and they are unable to produce male children, who either die in early infancy or are miscarried. This was in recognition of the fact that no Neanderthal Y chromosomes have ever been discovered in Homo sapiens, suggesting that male offspring of such hybridisation were either non-viable or sterile.

The Pennsylvania team, however, were seeking to explain why Neanderthal DNA is largely absent from the Homo sapiens X chromosome. As is well known, humans, like other mammals, have two sex chromosomes: females have two X chromosomes (one from each parent), while males have an X (from their mother) and a Y (from their father).

The researchers showed that if there was a preference for mating between Neanderthal males and Homo sapiens females, the fact that Homo sapiens contributed two X chromosomes to the hybrid gene pool for every one Neanderthal X chromosome could, over time, have led to the loss of Neanderthal DNA from the X chromosome. This suggests that sexual selection may have played a significant role in shaping human evolution, in addition to natural selection.

They also showed that Neanderthals possessed disproportionately more Homo sapiens DNA on their X chromosome than on their other chromosomes. This can likewise be explained by the influx of predominantly female Homo sapiens X-chromosome DNA into the Neanderthal gene pool, again supporting the hypothesis that hybrid matings occurred predominantly between Homo sapiens females and Neanderthal males, producing this imbalance.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary History of New Zealand Geese.

A reconstruction of the St Bathans goose, Metechen luti.

Artwork by Sasha Votyakova,
© Te Papa CC BY 4.0

New Zealand Giant Geese (Cnemiornis)

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‘Old Mother Goose’ adds to history of NZ birds | University of Otago

This paper is another of those that will probably excite creationists initially, but then set up more cognitive dissonance because the timeline is utterly inconsistent with their preferred Biblical narrative. It will excite them because it suggests biologists might have been wrong about something; the dissonance then comes from the fact that the scientists involved have no doubts at all that the Theory of Evolution explains the facts, and that what they may have got wrong is merely the exact timing of events that happened many millions of years ago.

The possible mistake concerns the assumption that the ancestors of the extinct giant flightless geese of the Cnemiornis genus arrived in New Zealand about 14 million years ago. New evidence suggests that this may instead have been only about 7 million years ago, providing another example of the rapid evolution that can occur through the so-called 'island effect'.

The usual creationist response to the inevitable cognitive dissonance is either to ignore the findings altogether or to claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the scientists got the dates wrong or invented figures to support a preconceived 'Darwinian' narrative.


But of course, what the paper actually demonstrates is the self-correcting nature of science, the contingency of scientific knowledge, and the willingness to change conclusions when the facts change — features of the scientific method that reflect the intellectual integrity of scientists and that give science its great power to determine the truth. This stands in stark contrast to creationism, which cannot move beyond the primitive superstitions of Bronze Age pastoralists, and which depends on intellectual bankruptcy — and the arrogance to believe one's opinions trump the evidence — in order to maintain belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The paper in question was recently published in the journal Historical Biology by members of an international collaboration between scientists from Otago University, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the University of Cambridge (UK), led by Alan J. D. Tennyson of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

So what exactly did the researchers discover that prompted this revision of the timeline? The answer lies in new fossil material and a re-examination of the evolutionary relationships of these remarkable birds. By comparing skeletal features and analysing their place within the broader family tree of waterfowl, the team were able to reassess when the ancestors of New Zealand’s giant flightless geese first arrived on the islands. Their results suggest that these birds colonised New Zealand far more recently than previously thought, after which they rapidly evolved into the large, flightless forms known from the fossil record.

This kind of rapid evolutionary change is a well-known phenomenon on islands, where isolation, the absence of mammalian predators, and new ecological opportunities can drive dramatic shifts in body size and behaviour. In the case of Cnemiornis, the descendants of ordinary flying waterfowl appear to have evolved into large, heavy, ground-dwelling birds in a relatively short geological time.

Refuting Creationism - How Deep-Sea Species Evolved

A field of deep-sea mussels (Bathymodiolus sp.) on the Atlantic margin seafloor near a cold methane seep.

Image: Deepwater Canyons 2013 -
Pathways to the Abyss, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS.

Into the deep: scientists find two paths | News | Physical Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

A recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B should ring alarm bells for any creationist with the courage and personal integrity to risk reading it. It reports on the findings of a team of three researchers led by scientists at the University of Chicago and including Stewart M. Edie, of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, that species adapted to deep-sea living evolved to survive in that difficult environment by two different evolutionary pathways.

The first problem for creationists here is that there is no doubt expressed anywhere in the paper that the explanation requires anything other than the Theory of Evolution. There is no sign — as with every other biomedical paper published so far this year — that evolutionary theory is proving inadequate and that biologists are turning instead to creationism, with its unevidenced magic entities and mysteries posing as answers to scientific questions. That narrative exists only in the imagination of creationists.

The second problem arises from the arrogant creationist belief that all living organisms were created especially for humans. If that were so, why ‘design’ some of them to live in the inaccessible depths of the oceans, where for much of human history their existence was entirely unknown? This question has been posed many times in these blog posts, yet not a single creationist has managed to produce anything more convincing than an appeal to ‘mysterious ways’.

The research team set out to understand how organisms living on the abyssal plain — where temperatures hover just a few degrees above freezing, pressures are immense enough to crush all but the most robust submersibles, sunlight never penetrates, and food is scarce — managed to adapt to such extreme conditions. Clearly, they had to undergo substantial evolutionary change, which is probably why relatively few lineages have made the transition, including certain bivalve molluscs such as mussels, oysters, scallops and clams.

The scientists examined the lineages of two groups of bivalves that successfully inhabit the deep sea. They found that one group, already adapted to harsh conditions, moved into the deep-sea environment and adjusted to those conditions without diversifying greatly. A second group, by contrast, radiated into a swarm of new species from a single ancestral lineage.

Refuting Creationism - Our Earliest Animal Ancestors May Have Been Sea Sponges - 541 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge, according to MIT geochemists who unearthed new evidence in very old rocks.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Another fatal blow against creationism was revealed recently by geochemists led by Professor Roger E. Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with news that they have found chemical evidence in ancient rocks suggesting that the earliest animals may have been the ancestors of sponges, living some 541 million years ago. Their findings have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

They succeeded in extracting the chemical signature of animal life from rocks in Oman, where they found an abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C₃₀) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was most likely derived from ancient sea sponges known as demosponges.

Not only is this fatal to creationists' notion of Earth being just a few thousand years old, with all living organisms magically created without ancestry and with different “kinds” unrelated to other “kinds”, but it also delivers another hammer blow to the creationist parody of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' as a literal explosive creation of multiple body plans in a single event. Slightly more sophisticated creationists attempt to claim that this was the act of creation for which the tales in Genesis are merely a metaphor, with each day of 'creation week' representing millions of years — a claim that collapses on realisation that, according to Genesis, green plants would have had to exist for millions of years with no sun to drive photosynthesis, since the sun is supposedly created the 'day' after plants.

This analysis pushes the origins of the Cambrian biota back into the Ediacaran, showing not a sudden spontaneous creation 540 million years ago, but the cumulative products of evolutionary diversification, probably beginning with these early multicellular organisms.
In addition to Professor Roger E. Summons of MIT, the team included Dr Lubna Shawar of Caltech, Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Refuting Creationism - Closing a Gap In the Fossil Record - 190 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Xiphodracon goldencapensis

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Reconstruction of what the Xiphodracon could have looked like.

Bob Nicholls.

Rare Jurassic 'Sword Dragon' prehistoric reptile discovered in the UK

Creationists crave gaps in scientific knowledge as somewhere to relocate their ever-shrinking little god, but few of them would have been aware of this particular gap — and even if they had been, it lay inconveniently within that vast stretch of Earth’s history that occurred long before creationism’s deity allegedly created the small flat planet with a dome over it described in Genesis.

The gap concerned the fossil record of ichthyosaur evolution — those marine, dolphin-like reptiles that were apex predators in the Jurassic oceans. The gap-filling specimen was recovered from cliffs near Golden Cap in Dorset, part of the ‘Jurassic Coast’.

It bridges the interval between the extinction of earlier ichthyosaur families and the emergence of later ones. Further compounding the embarrassment for creationists, it represents a genuinely transitional species, displaying a mosaic of primitive and derived features.

The new find — one of the most complete ichthyosaurs ever discovered — is described in a paper by Dean R. Lomax of Bristol University and honorary research fellow at Manchester University, Judy A. Massare of the State University of New York at Brockport, and Erin E. Maxwell of the State Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart, Germany, published in Papers in Palaeontology.

An additional difficulty for Intelligent Design advocates is that, like other secondarily marine vertebrates such as dolphins, turtles, seals and other cetaceans, ichthyosaurs were constrained to return to the surface to breathe. Their respiratory system was inherited from their terrestrial tetrapod ancestors. Yet, according to creationist claims, their putative designer had already produced an efficient system for extracting oxygen from water using gills. There is therefore no obvious theological reason why that same designer could not have equipped marine reptiles with gills as well.

Evolution, of course, has no foresight and no capacity to redeploy complex anatomical systems wholesale from one distant lineage to another. It can only modify inherited structures, constrained by ancestry and developmental pathways.

Refuting Creationism - A Small Problem for Science - A Massive Blow For Creationists

Scarisoara Ice Cave in Romania.

Credit: Paun V.I.

Bacteria frozen in ancient underground ice cave found to be resistant against 10 modern antibiotics

As every schoolboy knows, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic when the fungus Penicillium contaminated a Petri dish in which he had been culturing bacteria. What Fleming had discovered was a naturally occurring antibacterial substance produced by the fungus.

Such compounds are produced by fungi as part of their evolutionary arms race with the bacteria in their environment, and there is a whole range of them, many still awaiting discovery. On the other side of this arms race, bacteria evolve resistance.

It is a struggle that has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, ever since fungi evolved — and perhaps even earlier between ancestral eukaryotes and bacteria. Modern medical use of antibiotics has simply accelerated this ancient contest. We are now facing a major challenge in keeping pace with bacterial evolution, and hospitals in particular have become breeding grounds for resistant strains.

The tendency, therefore, is to assume that antibiotic resistance is a modern, anthropogenic phenomenon. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that a bacterium, Psychrobacter SC65A.3, recovered from 5,000-year-old ice cores in a Romanian cave, has been found to be resistant to ten modern antibiotics.

Frankly, this is difficult to explain other than in terms of earlier evolutionary arms races. The discovery, by a team from the Institute of Biology, Bucharest, Romania, with colleagues from the University of Bucharest and the Universidad de Antofagasta, Chile, is reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

While this finding presents microbiologists with an intriguing puzzle, it presents creationists with a more acute problem. There simply should not be 5,000-year-old ice preserved in a Romanian cave — let alone viable bacteria within it — if the biblical narrative of a global flood some 4,000 years ago were historically accurate. And if a putative designer deity created bacteria already equipped with resistance to antibiotics that would not be synthesised by humans for millennia, that would imply pre-emptive malevolence.

This leaves modern Intelligent Design advocates with an uncomfortable choice: retreat into literalist theology and abandon scientific reasoning, or confront the implications of the evidence.

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukarote) Cells - Origin Of The Cell Nucleus

Amoeba infected with a giant virus

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Ushikuvirus: A newly discovered giant virus may offer clues to the evolutionary relationships
Researchers discover a new virus called the "ushikuvirus" that provide evidence for the viral eukaryogenesis hypothesis and reveal virus-host interactions, shaping the evolution of eukaryotic cells.

Professor Masaharu Takemura.

Ushikuvirus: A Newly Discovered Giant Virus May Offer Clues to the Origin of Life | Tokyo University of Science

One of the remaining questions in evolutionary biology is how the complex (eukaryotic) cell acquired its defining feature: a membrane-bound nucleus in which the DNA is stored.

Prokaryotic cells — bacteria and archaea — possess a single circular DNA molecule located in the cytoplasm. By contrast, all eukaryotic cells contain their genetic material within a membrane-bound nucleus. Now scientists at the Graduate School of Science, Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, led by Professor Masaharu Takemura, have provided further evidence that the eukaryotic nucleus may have originated from a giant DNA virus, similar to those that infect certain species of amoeba. Their findings suggest that the origin of the nucleus may be closely linked to the evolutionary history of this class of virus as it adapted to different hosts.

Professor Takemura and Dr Philip Bell, from the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, independently proposed the viral eukaryogenesis theory (a term coined by Dr Bell) in 2001, suggesting that large DNA viruses — such as poxviruses — might represent plausible ancestors. Since then, beginning in 2003, the discovery of several giant DNA viruses has provided more compelling candidates. When these viruses infect a host cell, they establish so-called ‘virus factories’ within the cytoplasm. In some cases these structures are enclosed within membranes that resemble the nuclear envelope.

The hypothesis proposes that, rather than destroying its host, such a virus formed a long-term association with it. Over evolutionary time, it may have incorporated host genes and transitioned from parasite to symbiotic genetic compartment — eventually becoming the nucleus.

For advocates of “irreducible complexity”, the nucleus is often presented as an all-or-nothing structure: a fully formed membrane, nuclear pores, transport machinery, chromatin organisation and regulatory systems supposedly appearing together or not at all. Yet the viral eukaryogenesis model shows how this argument collapses once intermediate stages are recognised. Giant DNA viruses already construct membrane-bound replication compartments inside host cells; they encode components involved in DNA replication, transcription and even elements of translation.

These viral “factories” function as semi-autonomous genetic centres within the cytoplasm — in effect, simplified proto-nuclei. If such a structure entered into a stable symbiotic relationship with a host cell, incremental gene exchange and co-evolution could gradually integrate and refine the system. Each step would confer immediate functional advantages — protection of DNA, separation of transcription from translation, improved regulation — without requiring the simultaneous appearance of a fully modern nucleus. What is claimed to be irreducible instead looks like a product of stepwise evolutionary integration.

Now Professor Takemura’s team report the discovery of a new giant DNA virus infecting amoebae — the ushikuvirus, named after Lake Ushiku where it was isolated — lending further support to the viral eukaryogenesis theory. Their discovery is reported in Journal of Virology.

How We Know The Bible Is Wrong - ESA/Hubble Picture Of The Week

The N159 star-forming complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
approximately 160,000 light-years away

A neighbouring vista of stellar birth | ESA/Hubble

The simplest way to tell whether the Bible is the inerrant description of reality that creationists claim it to be, or the work of ignorant people doing their best to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding with stories that complied with the prevailing culture which imagined a world that ran on magic in which invisible spirits made things happen, is by comparing what it says with what science is revealing.

Almost invariably, what we see is that the descriptions in the Bible bear little or no resemblance to the real world, as we can see most clearly by comparing the biblical description of the universe with what the universe is really like. The Bible describes it as consisting of a small, flat planet with a dome over it, at the centre, with all the celestial bodies such as the sun moon and stars attached to the dome, above which is water.

This was conjured into existence out of nothing by some magic words spoken in a language no-one was alive to understand, apparently.

So, lets remind ourselves of the Bible's description again, and compare it to the latest image of a tiny fragment of the universe from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Hubble space telescope - the ESA/Hubble picture of the week.

Malevolent Design - Yet More Evidence Of Intelligently Designed Cancer?

Scientists Uncover Key Driver of Treatment-Resistant Cancer

These images show the beginnings of chromothripsis in colorectal cancer cells. The N4BP2 enzyme (green) infiltrates a micronucleus (zoomed in square selections), where it induces DNA damage (red). Blue represents the main cell nucleus.

Credit: UC San Diego Health Sciences

At the risk of labouring the point I made in my post yesterday — that the exact same arguments ID creationists use as ‘proof’ of intelligent design can also be applied to cancers, parasites, pathogens, and genetic diseases, thereby ‘proving’, in ID terms, that these too were intelligently designed by the same deity — we have yet another example of complex specified genetic information driving the evolution of cancers as they rapidly develop resistance to treatments.

This is reported in a research paper in Science by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego).

The researchers discovered an enzyme responsible for breaking up a chromosome in cancer cells and rearranging it into a scrambled version, enabling the tumour to evolve rapidly. The process is quite simple and closely mimics evolution by natural selection, or the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Shuffling genes in this way increases the likelihood that a small number of cancer cells will survive the treatment aimed at destroying them. The tumour then regrows from these resistant cells, producing a treatment-resistant cancer.

This ability, known as chromothripsis, is found in about 24% of human cancers.

The key to this process is the protein enzyme N4BP2, and the complex, specified gene that produces it. The process begins when an error in DNA replication causes individual chromosomes to become trapped inside tiny, fragile structures called micronuclei. When these micronuclei burst, the chromosome is exposed to nucleases — enzymes capable of breaking DNA.

Within the ID creationist paradigm, there are no such things as mistakes: everything works exactly as it was designed to work. So we are left to assume that these fragile micronuclei, with their entrapped chromosomes, are a deliberate design feature.

The researchers showed that N4BP2 is uniquely capable of entering micronuclei and breaking the trapped chromosome.

To test the hypothesis that N4BP2 is the culprit, they eliminated it in brain cancer cells and observed a reduction in chromothripsis. They then introduced it into healthy cell nuclei and found that it caused chromosomes to break even in otherwise normal cells.

This is, of course, just as much compelling evidence of intelligent design as anything traditionally cited by ID creationists as proof of an intelligent designer. By contrast, the theory of evolution provides an explanation with none of the problems that force creationists to retreat into contradictory theology, Bronze Age origin myths, and appeals to ‘mystery’.

Creationism Refuted - How Neanderthals and Later Hunter-Gatherers Changed The European Landscape

Neanderthal hunting party

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A new study shows that Neanderthals did not shy away from hunting even very large animals, such as the prehistoric elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tons. The impact of Neanderthals and hunter-gatherer peoples on nature turns out to have had a far greater influence on shaping the landscape of what we now know as Europe.

Photo: Wikimedia, AI

Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lit the fire: Humans shaped European landscapes long before agriculture

The past is a minefield for creationism because it becomes increasingly impossible to shoehorn reality into a 6,000–10,000-year timescale, or to maintain the fantasy of humans and animals appearing suddenly, without ancestry, only a few millennia ago. The more we learn about prehistory, the more creationists are forced either to dismiss the evidence or pretend it does not exist. Their difficulty is that their childish view of reality is rooted in the best guesses of ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists, who knew nothing of the world beyond their narrow horizons and understood nothing of the sciences that now inform our understanding of the universe around us.

In a paper published last October in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by Anastasia Nikulina (Leiden University and Durham University), and including Professor Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University, argue that Neanderthals — and later Homo sapiens — were already instrumental in shaping the European landscape long before agriculture transformed it. The most significant drivers of change were hunting of the megafauna and the widespread use of anthropogenic fire.

And of course, this explanation incorporates something creationism cannot successfully accommodate within its preferred mythology: the existence of an archaic human species that predated Homo sapiens in Eurasia by several hundred thousand years. It also rests upon a history of climatic change in Europe that makes sense only within the context of a world vastly older than creationist mythology can allow.

The team reached their conclusions after an extensive analysis of pollen records from two warm periods in European history: one between 125,000 and 116,000 years ago, and the other between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. By comparing these results with computer simulations modelling the effects of climate change, large herbivores, and natural fires alone — and then adding the impacts of human hunting and deliberate burning — they found that the human-influenced models provided the best fit to the pollen data.

Creationism Refuted - Poisoned Arrows 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Preparing poison arrowheads, 60,000 years ago at the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Both sides of one of the arrowheads analysed. The left-hand image shows the organic remains in which the arrowhead residues were identified.

Photo: Marlize Lombard.

World’s oldest arrow poison – 60,000-year-old traces reveal early advanced hunting techniques - Stockholms universitet

Creationism’s Biblical narrative has just become even harder to defend, with news that researchers from South Africa and Sweden, led by Professor Sven Isaksson of the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University, have identified the oldest traces of arrow poison yet discovered. These were found on 60,000-year-old quartz arrowheads from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

That is a full 50,000 years before creationist mythology claims the world was created, but entirely consistent with the palaeontological and archaeological evidence that fully modern humans had already evolved in Africa and were developing increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The discovery is reported open access in Science Advances.

The significance of this find is two-fold. Firstly, it shows that early humans had invented the bow and arrow as a hunting weapon much earlier than previously thought. Secondly, it demonstrates that they also understood how to exploit natural toxins — specifically the alkaloids buphanidrine and epibuphanisine — found in the plant Boophone disticha, commonly known as gifbol or “poison onion”. Traces of these compounds had previously been identified on arrowheads only around 250 years old, so this remarkable discovery reveals that the knowledge and use of such poison technology persisted among hunter-gatherer groups for tens of millennia.