A problem for biblical literalist creationists is that they are wedded to the absurd and demonstrably false notion that the Bible is a literal account of real history, including a catastrophic, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago. Such a flood would have left a tell-tale, globally recognisable layer of flood sediment containing the jumbled remains of the animals and plants it had killed. It would also have destroyed, displaced or buried earlier human settlements beneath one unmistakable flood horizon.
This, of course, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. The predicted global layer of flood silt is not there, and the archaeological record continues, uninterrupted, through the very period in which creationists need their flood to have occurred. Practically every archaeological find older than the various creationist dates for Noah's Flood — from the pyramids at Giza to the less spectacular but more numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age burial grounds, field systems, settlements, tools and artefacts that litter the African and Eurasian landscape — should not be where it is, least of all in the Middle East, the supposed epicentre of the alleged catastrophe.
And yet archaeologists are regularly digging up evidence of human activity that long predates the creationist timescale. A recent example is the grim, 7,000-year-old evidence of headless human bodies at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby in Slovakia, reported in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. The refutation of creationist mythology is, of course, entirely incidental. The archaeological question is what this extraordinary find tells us about an Early Neolithic farming society. The indications so far are that the heads were not removed by violent decapitation as a form of execution — which might have suggested a society in crisis or conflict — but were skilfully removed around the time of death. That points instead to some form of social, ritual or funerary practice, although the precise meaning of that practice remains uncertain.
The site at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby comprises more than 300 house outlines arranged in three neighbourhoods, with up to 80 buildings inhabited at the same time. The settlement existed for several centuries, approximately between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood was enclosed by a ditch, probably marking a boundary, and it was in or around this ditch, especially near the entrance to the settlement, that archaeologists found the remains of at least 78 individuals. Of these, 77 lacked heads, the single exception being a child whose skull was still present.
A paper just published in iScience should, if they were aware of it, at least cause an honest creationist to question some basic assumptions. It reports that modern European fallow deer, Dama dama, retain only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in their Ice Age ancestors. This finding is based on ancient DNA recovered from the fossilised remains of ten, approximately 120,000-year-old fallow deer from Neumark-Nord in Germany, analysed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Creationism continues to take a battering in the world of real science, where yet another paper quite incidentally refutes several of its basic dogmas. Creationists, who are notoriously reluctant to read serious science and would probably struggle to understand it if they did, will no doubt remain blissfully unaware of this constant refutation of their core superstitions.
To ensure that ignorance is maintained, creationist disinformation sites expend considerable effort in spreading distrust of serious science amongst their followers. What cult leader would want his followers reading anything that exposes his claims as bogus?
However, ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and the facts this paper reveals go to the heart of creationist mythology. Firstly, this evidence should not exist at all if the Bible creation myth were real history: a magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global genocide, would leave no room for a 120,000-year-old population of fallow deer preserved in an Eemian lake environment. Secondly, it undermines the creationist parody of evolution that they so often attack: the false claim that evolution must always mean increasing complexity, and that any loss of genetic information is invariably fatal.
The reduced genetic diversity of modern fallow deer is a clear example of evolution involving a loss of genetic variation within a population. So far as individual deer are concerned, there need be no immediate reduction in fitness; the problem comes when a population has less capacity to respond to environmental change, disease, or other selective pressures, and may then be more vulnerable to extinction. Evolution, of course, has no plan. Unlike intelligent design, or even guided evolution, it cannot foresee future conditions and prepare a species for them. A species can be driven towards extinction by the simple operation of mindless natural processes.
Amber piece 1552.b showing bioinclusions. Arrow in a (top): inclusion of †Ctenobethylus goepperti; arrow in b (bottom): inclusion of the Sciaridae. Scale bar 5 mm.
Some years ago, while staying for a few days in Berlin in a hotel just off Goethestraße, I made the mistake of telling a taxi driver that our hotel was just off “Go-eth Straße”. It took several minutes and a map to sort out the confusion.
“Nein! Goethe-Straße!” he laughed. Only then did I realise that “Go-eth” and “Goethe” were not two different German philosophers.
“Ach ja! Danke! Goethe! Ich bin ein Engländer!” I explained, in my best German.
“Ja! Is better we speak English,” he replied.
Goethestraße — Goethe Street — is, of course, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the German writer, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also an administrator, scientist, geologist, botanist and philosopher. As a naturalist and collector, he left behind an extensive geological and mineralogical collection, including 40 pieces of Baltic amber, which have now been closely examined by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena — appropriately enough, since Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller were friends.
What they found was the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports, published in January 2026. It is not good news for creationists, since it concerns an approximately 40-million-year-old ant, preserved in exquisite detail and now visible using modern imaging techniques such as synchrotron micro-computed tomography. In addition to the ant, the scientists also found a fungus gnat and a blackfly in Goethe’s amber.
It is unlikely that Goethe knew these creatures were preserved in his amber, since the pieces are unpolished and the contents are barely visible to the untrained eye. He certainly could not have known that the amber was tens of millions of years old. Had he known, we can only speculate how that knowledge might have affected his view of nature, time and human origins. His famous work, Faust, draws deeply on Christian motifs, including the story of a man who makes a pact with the Devil; but Goethe was also a serious observer of nature, living at a time when geology, palaeontology and evolutionary thinking were still in their infancy.
In the early nineteenth century, Europeans had not yet accumulated the overwhelming evidence that Earth is billions of years old and that life has changed profoundly over vast periods of time. Many educated people still interpreted history, nature and morality through a biblical framework, even when their own thinking was more subtle than simple literalism. Goethe, despite his scientific curiosity, lived before Darwin, before modern stratigraphy was fully established, and long before modern imaging could reveal the hidden contents of an opaque piece of amber.
Now, of course, we know better, because of the tremendous scientific progress made over the last two centuries.
Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.
Artwork by Mauricio Antón.
Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?
This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.
They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.
One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.
The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.
The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.
This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.
Leaving a side the long history of archaic hominins such as the Neanderthals and their ancestors inhabiting Western Eurasia for about 250,000 years before the arrival of large numbers of anatomically modern humans, which itself is deeply problematic for creationists, there is also the archaeological record of the complext history of modern humans going back at least 40,000 years which simply would not be there if the Bible narrative of a recent spontaneous magical origin and a later global genocidal flood were true.
As reported in a paper in Nature last February (2026), the history of Northwest Europe and the Bristic Isles is far mpre complex and interesting that the simple Bronze Age fairy tail in Genesis.
Of course, the arcahaeolgeneticists never set out to disprove the Bible. The facts they revealed did that as a matter of course, because unlike Genesis, the facts record real events.
The contrast could hardly be more stark. Genesis gives us a world populated from a single specially-created human pair, followed by a later repopulation of the world from Noah’s family after a global flood, and then the dispersal of peoples after Babel. That is a story of magical manufacture, catastrophic reset and sudden dispersal. The ancient DNA tells a completely different story: long-lived regional populations, gradual migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, local ecological adaptation and no global genetic bottleneck compatible with a recent universal flood.
A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution last november (2025) by four evolutionary biologists from the University of Michigan might have caused a stir of excitement in creationists cirles if any of them ever read a science paper because it appears on first sight to question the basis of the Theory of Evolution - what creationists call 'Dawinism'. However, that excitement would have been short-lived if they had read the details.
This is not the long-awaited collapse of the Theory of Evolution that creationists have been confidently predicting since at least the middle of the last century. It is nothing of the sort. It is a normal example of science doing what science does: testing a model against evidence, finding that the model is incomplete, and adjusting the explanation accordingly.
The theory being challenged here is not evolution itself, nor common descent, nor natural selection, nor mutation, nor population genetics. It is the neutral theory of molecular evolution, a theory developed in the 1960s to explain why many genetic changes appear to spread through populations without obvious adaptive advantage. The new paper argues that this appearance of neutrality may be misleading. What looks neutral in the long term may, in fact, be the result of short-term adaptation to changing environments.
The researchers found that beneficial mutations are more common than the classic neutral theory assumes. The problem, then, is why these apparently useful mutations do not become fixed at the rate one might expect. Their answer is beautifully evolutionary: environments change. A mutation that helps in one set of conditions may be useless, or even harmful, in another. So populations are not marching steadily towards some perfect design; they are continually tracking a moving target.
That is what the authors mean by adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy. “Pleiotropy” means that one mutation can have more than one effect. “Antagonistic” means that those effects can pull in opposite directions: helpful here, harmful there; useful now, costly later. This is not magic. It is not supernatural intervention. It is the ordinary interaction between genes, organisms and environments.
Creationists often pretend that science is an orthodoxy in which biologists merely defend Darwin at all costs. This paper shows the opposite. Scientists have examined one of their own long-standing theories, compared it with new evidence, and proposed a better explanation. No sacred text was protected. No dogma was shielded from scrutiny. No conclusion was declared immune from revision.
The result is not less evolution, but more evolutionary detail. Mutation still supplies variation. Selection still acts on differences in reproductive success. Genetic drift still matters. Environments still shape which variants succeed and which fail. What has changed is the understanding of how molecular change can appear neutral over deep time while still being shaped by episodes of adaptation in shifting environments.
So, far from helping creationism, this paper undercuts one of creationism’s favourite caricatures of science. It shows evolutionary biology as a living, self-correcting science, not a rigid ideology. It also shows why no supernatural designer is needed. The process described is entirely natural: mutations arise, their effects depend on circumstances, environments change, and populations respond as best they can, without foresight, plan or purpose.
In my previous post, I wrote about Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre distant relative of the crocodile line which walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and possessed a toothless mouth tipped with a beak. Although not a dinosaur, it looked superficially dinosaur-like — a neat example of convergent evolution. Because earlier and later shuvosaurids were already known from the region, palaeontologists predicted that a form occupying the gap between them should exist, and Labrujasuchus duly turned up in the right place and in the right rock formation.
That is how science works: evidence fits into a testable, predictive framework. Creationism, by contrast, has nothing to offer except hand-waving, misrepresentation and denial when confronted with a bizarre extinct archosaur from some 212 million years ago, just as it has nothing to offer in explanation of this almost equally bizarre dinosaur from about 70 million years ago.
The new species, Kank australis, is described by palaeontologist Dr Matías J. Motta, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”), and his colleagues in a paper published on 28 May 2026 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Kank australis was a paravian theropod — an unenlagiid, belonging to a group of small- to medium-sized raptor-like dinosaurs known from Late Cretaceous Gondwanan deposits. Its discoverers suggest that it may have lived rather like a large heron. Its long jaws, armed with teeth, suggest a fish-eating habit, while its cervical vertebrae show structures associated with muscle attachment and the protection of neck blood vessels, features comparable with those seen in modern birds that rely on rapid, precise neck movements. In other words, this was probably not the familiar pop-culture image of a raptor as a fast-running terrestrial predator, but a specialised animal exploiting the riverine and wetland ecosystems of southern Patagonia.
And, as so often with new fossil discoveries, Kank australis fills in yet another of those gaps so beloved of creationists looking for somewhere to hide their ever-shrinking little god. In this case, it helps bridge a distributional gap in the Late Cretaceous record of southern Patagonia, connecting better-known unenlagiid records from northern Patagonia with those from Antarctica, and adding more detail to the still-patchy evolutionary history of these South American paravian dinosaurs.
Figure 1.
Foraging of urediniospores by bees on plants infected with myrtle rust. a. Honey bee forager collecting Austropuccinia psidii urediniospores from leaves of broadleaf paperbark [Melaleuca quinquenervia (Myrtales, Myrtaceae)], Bungawalbin, New South Wales, Australia; b. A. psidii urediniospores in the opening of a Geraldton wax [Chamelaucium uncinatum (Myrtales, Myrtaceae)] flower bud in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Photographs by Geoff Pegg.
A paper published in March 2026 in NeoBiota is entirely unsurprising to an evolutionary biologist, but deeply awkward for anyone trying to present nature as the intelligent design of an omnibenevolent creator. It reports what appears to be a mutually beneficial relationship between the introduced Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, and the invasive fungal plant pathogen myrtle rust, Austropuccinia psidii. It is a neat example of how evolution has no foresight, no moral purpose and no long-term plan. Symbiotic alliances can arise naturally between different species when there is an immediate benefit to both, even when the longer-term consequences for one or both partners — and for the wider ecosystem — may be destructive.
Myrtle rust, Austropuccinia psidii, is an invasive rust fungus in Australia. It infects more than 500 species in the Myrtaceae family, which includes many of Australia’s culturally, ecologically and economically important native plants, including eucalypts, paperbarks and related species. In Australia, the pathogen is regarded as a serious threat to native ecosystems, with around 17% of endemic vegetation considered at risk. The other partner in this apparent mutualism is also an introduced species: the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera.
The basis of this relationship is an exquisite example of the sort of functional complexity creationists routinely try to claim as evidence for intelligent design. That, of course, raises the obvious question: why would an omnibenevolent designer design a fungal pathogen capable of damaging so much of Australia’s native vegetation, and then provide it with a convenient pollinator-assisted dispersal system?
The mechanism is ingenious, but only in the blind, short-term sense in which natural selection can be ingenious. The bright yellow urediniospores of myrtle rust are collected by honey bees much as pollen is collected. The bees pack the spores into their pollen baskets and carry them back to the hive. For the fungus, this provides a potential route for dispersal beyond simple wind movement. For the bees, the spores are not just inert particles accidentally mistaken for pollen; they have real nutritional value. The researchers found that myrtle rust spores contained more than 22% protein and all ten amino acids regarded as essential for honey bee nutrition, making them comparable with high-quality pollen.
Laboratory feeding trials also showed that honey bee larvae could develop normally on a diet based on myrtle rust spores, with survival, development time and body weight similar to larvae reared on a high-quality pollen diet. Even more concerning from a biosecurity point of view, the spores remained viable inside honey bee colonies for at least nine days, meaning that hives could potentially act as reservoirs and transport systems for the pathogen.
So, the fungus gains a mobile vector, while the bees gain an alternative protein source. But what benefits both in the short term could be damaging in the longer term. As myrtle rust damages Myrtaceae-rich habitats, it can reduce the availability of flowers and pollen. That, in turn, could encourage honey bees to rely more heavily on fungal spores or other alternative foods, while the fungus benefits from the continued movement of bees and managed hives. The result could be a damaging ecological feedback loop, with plant-pollinator networks and forest regeneration placed under increasing pressure.
This is precisely the kind of outcome that any omniscient, intelligent designer should have foreseen and avoided. It is also precisely the kind of outcome that a mindless evolutionary process can produce without difficulty. Natural selection rewards immediate reproductive or nutritional advantage; it does not plan for ecological stability, protect biodiversity, or ensure that mutually beneficial relationships remain harmless in the long term.
The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:
What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.
Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.
We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.
So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.
Although they may have retained some residual function, what the forelimbs of Tyrannosaurus rex were almost certainly not used for was grabbing and holding large prey. They were far too short and mechanically limited for that role, especially in a predator whose real killing equipment was a massive skull, powerful jaws and bone-crushing bite. So, creationists need to explain why an intelligent designer would have equipped one of the most formidable predators ever to walk the Earth with such apparently inadequate little arms in the first place.
These apparent design failures are, of course, entirely understandable as the result of an evolutionary process operating over deep time. Just such an explanation has now been proposed by three researchers from University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge, who have published their findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It almost goes without saying that their explanation is an application of the Theory of Evolution, with no suggestion that the authors are about to abandon it in favour of creationism — as creationists have been confidently predicting for the best part of half a century, despite the singular lack of any peer-reviewed scientific movement in that direction.
The researchers found a strong association between the evolution of large, robust skulls and the reduction of forelimbs in several groups of non-avian theropod dinosaurs. In other words, the tiny arms of T. rex were not merely a side-effect of the whole body becoming larger. They were more closely linked to the evolution of powerful heads and jaws, suggesting a shift in hunting strategy in which the skull became the principal weapon and the forelimbs became less important.
The authors are careful to point out that correlation does not prove causation. But the pattern is consistent with an evolutionary arms race in which large predatory dinosaurs increasingly relied on massive skulls and crushing bites to tackle large prey, rather than on grasping forelimbs. As lead author Charlie Roger Scherer put it, trying to grab and hold a huge herbivorous dinosaur with claws would not have been ideal; attacking and holding with the jaws may have been far more effective.
For their study, the researchers developed a new way to quantify skull robustness, using factors such as how tightly the bones of the skull were connected, the compactness of the skull, and bite force. On this measure, T. rex scored highest, followed by Tyrannotitan, a large South American theropod that lived more than 30 million years earlier.
The study also showed that forelimb reduction evolved independently in at least five theropod groups: tyrannosaurids, abelisaurids, carcharodontosaurids, megalosaurids and ceratosaurids. That makes this a case of convergent evolution: different lineages arriving at a similar anatomical result because similar selective pressures favoured a similar functional solution.
The evolutionary sequence is straightforward in this case: as the prey became larger so the jaw and skull needed to become larger to kill and consume the prey. The mouth then became the primary means of gripping and killing the prey and the forelimbs, which are not needed for locomotion, became increasingly redundant but liable to injury, so there was an advantage in reducing their size. The fact that there was convergence in different lineages, is strongly suggestive that this mechanism evolved for the same reasons, multiple times.
The Evolution of the Tyrannosaurs.
Tyrannosaurus rex was not the starting point of the tyrannosaur story, but one of its final and most extreme products. The wider group, Tyrannosauroidea, had a long evolutionary history stretching back into the Middle Jurassic, more than 100 million years before T. rex. For much of that time, tyrannosauroids were not gigantic apex predators, but mostly small to medium-sized, lightly built theropods living alongside, and often in the shadow of, other large carnivorous dinosaurs.[1]
Early tyrannosauroids included animals such as Proceratosaurus from Jurassic Britain and Guanlong from Jurassic China. These were not simply miniature versions of T. rex. Some had crests, longer arms and more generalised predatory bodies. Their importance lies in showing that tyrannosaurs did not appear suddenly as fully formed, giant, short-armed killing machines. The famous late Cretaceous body plan was assembled gradually, piece by piece, over tens of millions of years.[1,2]
Several Early Cretaceous tyrannosauroids also show how different the early members of the group were from their later descendants. Dilong paradoxus, from China, was small and gracile, with relatively long arms and three-fingered hands. It also preserved evidence of filamentous protofeathers, showing that at least some early tyrannosauroids were not the purely scaly monsters of older popular reconstructions.[3]
The discovery of Yutyrannus huali, also from Early Cretaceous China, pushed that point further. This was a much larger tyrannosauroid, yet it too preserved long filamentous feathers. That does not prove that an adult T. rex was fully feathered, and skin impressions from later tyrannosaurids suggest at least some scaly areas. But it does show that feathers were part of the wider tyrannosauroid evolutionary background, not an irrelevant bird-like novelty.[4]
By the Late Cretaceous, especially in Asia and western North America, tyrannosaurids had become the dominant large predators. Genera such as Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus show the familiar trend towards massive skulls, powerful jaws, thick teeth, strong hind limbs, keen senses and reduced forelimbs. This was not a single act of design, but a long evolutionary sequence in which the skull and jaws increasingly took over the role of subduing prey.[1,5]
Recent work has added further detail to this picture. In 2025, researchers described Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, a Mongolian tyrannosauroid from the lower Upper Cretaceous, as a form close to the origin of Eutyrannosauria — the group that includes the large, late Cretaceous tyrannosaurs. Their analysis suggests a complex history of dispersal between Asia and North America, with tyrannosaur evolution involving migration, ecological opportunity and divergent growth patterns, rather than a simple straight-line progression from small ancestor to giant descendant.[6]
So the tiny arms of T. rex are not an isolated oddity needing to be excused as good design. They are part of a broader evolutionary pattern in which tyrannosaurs changed from relatively small, long-armed predators into large, skull-dominated apex predators. The result looks puzzling if imagined as the work of a designer starting from scratch, but it makes sense as the outcome of descent with modification, changing ecological pressures, and the evolutionary reworking of inherited anatomy.
The publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B is accompanied by a news release from UCL.
Why meat-eating dinosaurs like T. rex evolved tiny armsThe evolution of tiny arms in several groups of meat-eating dinosaurs was likely driven by the development of strong, powerful heads, which were used to attack prey, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL and Cambridge University.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at data for 82 species of theropod (two-legged, mainly meat-eating dinosaurs), finding that shortening of forelimbs occurred across five groups, including tyrannosaurids, the family that included Tyrannosaurus rex.
The team, including Dr Elizabeth Steell at Cambridge and Professor Paul Upchurch at UCL, found that smaller arms were closely linked to the development of large, powerful skulls and jaws, more so than to larger overall body size, indicating that tiny arms were not just a by-product of bodies getting bigger.
The researchers suggested that the increasing size of prey, in the form of gigantic sauropods (long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters) and other large herbivores, may have resulted in a shift to hunting using jaws and head instead of claws.
Everyone knows the T. rex had tiny arms but other giant theropod dinosaurs also evolved relatively small forelimbs. The Carnotaurus had ridiculously tiny arms, smaller than the T. rex. We sought to understand what was driving this change and found a strong relationship between short arms and large, powerfully built heads. The head took over from the arms as the method of attack. It’s a case of ‘use it or lose it’ – the arms are no longer useful and reduce in size over time. These adaptations often occurred in areas with gigantic prey. Trying to pull and grab at a 100ft-long sauropod with your claws is not ideal. Attacking and holding on with the jaws might have been more effective.
While our study identifies correlations and so cannot establish cause and effect, it is highly likely that strongly built skulls came before shorter forelimbs. It would not make evolutionary sense for it to occur the other way round, and for these predators to give up their attack mechanism without having a back-up.
Charlie Roger Scherer, lead author.
Department of Earth Sciences
University College London
London, UK.
For the study, researchers developed a new way to quantify skull robustness, based on factors including how tightly connected the bones of the head were, the dimensions of the skull (a more compact shape is stronger than an elongated shape), and bite force.
On this measure, the T. rex scored highest, followed by the Tyrannotitan, a theropod nearly as massive as T. rex who lived in what is now Argentina in the Early Cretaceous period (more than 30 million years earlier than T. rex).
The team said that increasingly gigantic prey may have resulted in an “evolutionary arms race”, where theropods developed strong skulls and jaws to better subdue this prey, and in many cases grew to gigantic sizes themselves.
Separately, the team compared forelimb length to skull length, classifying five groups of dinosaurs as having reduced forelimbs: tyrannosaurids, abelisaurids, carcharodontosaurids (including the Tyrannotitan), megalosaurids and ceratosaurids.
They found reduced forelimbs had a stronger link with skull robustness than with skull size or overall body size. The secondary importance of overall body size was illustrated by the fact that some theropods with strongly built heads and tiny arms were not very large, the researchers said, citing the Majungasaurus, an apex predator in Madagascar 70 million years ago, but weighing a mere 1.6 tonnes, about a fifth of the T. rex.
The researchers noted that the forelimbs appeared to reduce in size in different ways, with hands and the lower part of the arm (past the elbow) shortening the most in abelisaurids (with late abelisaurids such as the Majungasaurus having exceptionally tiny hands). In tyrannosaurids, on the other hand, each element of the forelimb was reduced at a similar rate.
The team concluded that the same outcome (tiny forelimbs) was likely achieved through potentially different developmental pathways in different species.
A team of five academics work on different aspects of dinosaur evolution at UCL, with strong collaborative links to the Natural History Museum. The extended research group comprises four research fellows and postdoc researchers, and more than 10 PhD students. At least four of the PhD students are working on dinosaur evolution, with the others looking at a wider array of other evolutionary questions relating to vertebrates, including crocodiles and birds.
Abstract
Forelimb reduction has been observed in numerous and disparate non-avian theropod dinosaurs, resulting in the hypothesis that reduced forelimbs evolved convergently. Clades with reduced forelimbs also possess high degrees of cranial robusticity and gigantic body sizes. Here, we provide a novel quantification of forelimb reduction across Theropoda, and create and implement a cranial robusticity scoring system, and analyse this dataset using bivariate and comparative phylogenetic analyses. Results indicate that forelimb reduction is strongly correlated with cranial robusticity and gigantism. Reduced/vestigial forelimbs evolved in at least five theropod lineages in concert with increased cranial robusticity and gigantism. Abelisaurids, carcharodontosaurids and tyrannosaurids show the greatest forelimb reduction relative to the skull. Repeated forelimb reduction across theropods was facilitated by increased cranial robusticity and greater body size that was potentially influenced by an upward trend in prey body size. These events resulted in a shift from subduing prey using grasping forelimbs to using powerful bites and robust skulls.
So the famously tiny arms of Tyrannosaurus rex are not an embarrassment for evolutionary biology; they are exactly the sort of thing evolution explains. They are the result of history, contingency and trade-offs: inherited anatomy being modified over time as natural selection favoured a different way of killing prey. As the skull became larger, stronger and more effective as the main predatory weapon, the forelimbs became less important, and so there was no evolutionary pressure to maintain them as large, powerful grasping organs.
That is why this feature is so difficult to explain as the work of an intelligent designer. A designer starting from scratch could simply have produced an animal with both a massive, bone-crushing skull and proportionately useful forelimbs, or dispensed with the arms altogether. Instead, what we see is the familiar evolutionary pattern: not perfect engineering, but modified inheritance; not clean-sheet design, but anatomical compromise shaped by changing selection pressures.
Creationism has no scientific explanation for this. It can only wave the problem away by declaring, without evidence, that the tiny arms must have had some unknown purpose, or that the designer’s motives are beyond human understanding. But that is not an explanation; it is an excuse for not having one. It predicts nothing, explains nothing, and adds nothing to our understanding of tyrannosaur biology.
The Theory of Evolution, by contrast, not only explains why such apparently odd features exist, but also provides a framework in which they can be tested. The prediction is that similar ecological and functional pressures should produce similar anatomical trends in separate lineages — and that is exactly what this study found. Forelimb reduction evolved independently in several theropod groups, associated not with divine whim, but with the repeated evolution of large, robust skulls and powerful jaws.
In other words, the tiny arms of T. rex are not a mystery for science; they are evidence of evolution doing what evolution does — adapting existing structures to changing circumstances, often imperfectly, always historically, and never with the foresight or tidiness that intelligent design would require. Once again, the evidence fits the evolutionary model and leaves creationism with nothing more substantial than incredulity, special pleading and the hope that no one looks too closely.
Advertisement
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
I wrote recently about how and why dinosaurs are such a problem for creationists, which is why some of them resort to the desperate and ludicrously implausible claim that non-avian dinosaurs were contemporaneous with modern humans.
Their problem has now become a little worse with the announcement, in a paper in Scientific Reports, of the discovery of a new species of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur from Thailand. The study was led by palaeontologists from University College London (UCL), Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand. The dinosaur has been named Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis and is described as the largest dinosaur yet found in Southeast Asia. Its fossilised bones were discovered about ten years ago at the edge of a communal pond in Chaiyaphum Province, north-eastern Thailand.
The scale of the animal is impressive. One of its front leg bones, the right humerus, was 1.78 metres long — about the height of an adult human. From the preserved spine, ribs, pelvis and limb bones, the researchers estimate that Nagatitan was about 27 metres long and weighed around 27 tonnes, roughly the same as nine adult Asian elephants.
Nagatitan was a sauropod — one of the long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaurs that included animals such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. More specifically, it was a somphospondylan titanosauriform, belonging to Euhelopodidae, a clade of sauropods so far known only from Asia. It lived during the Early Cretaceous, about 100–120 million years ago, in what was then a semi-arid landscape crossed by meandering rivers and inhabited by fish, freshwater sharks, crocodile-like reptiles, pterosaurs, smaller herbivorous dinosaurs and large theropod predators.
