Refuting Creationism - Fossils of Complex Cells In Australian Mudstone - From 1.7 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Layers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory

Maxwell Lechte

Fossils of single-celled eukaryotic organisms with complex surface features such as extensions and plates.

Leigh Anne Riedman

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life

For young-Earth creationists, some of the most troublesome evidence comes in the smallest packages. Microscopic fossils preserved in ancient Australian mudstones record organisms living approximately 1.75–1.4 billion years ago — an antiquity impossible to reconcile with the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of the biblical genealogies. These organisms were already part of aLayers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territoryn evolving biosphere more than a billion years before the supposed “Creation Week”. Their existence presents a chronological problem that no amount of argument about the meaning of “kind” can resolve.

These fossils are the subject of a paper in Nature, by Maxwell A. Lechte and colleagues, investigating the environments inhabited by some of the earliest known eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are organisms with structurally complex cells, typically containing a nucleus and specialised internal compartments; they include animals, plants, fungi and numerous microscopic organisms. Here, “complex life” refers to cellular organisation, not to miniature animals swimming through those ancient seas. Understanding these early cells helps explain the evolutionary foundations upon which much later forms of life depended.

Glossary.

Aerobes

Organisms that use oxygen in their metabolism. Obligate aerobes require it; facultative anaerobes can grow with or without it; microaerophiles require oxygen at concentrations below those in ordinary air.

Benthic

Living on, in or close to the bottom of a sea or lake. A “benthic habit” means a bottom-dwelling way of life.

Planktonic

Living suspended in the water and drifting largely with currents, rather than inhabiting the seabed.

Bottom waters

The water immediately above the seabed. It can lack oxygen even when the surface waters contain it.

Morphological complexity

Complexity of physical form or structure. Elaborate fossil walls, ornamentation and extensions can help researchers recognise probable eukaryotes.

Palaeontological, sedimentological and geochemical analyses

Studies of fossils, sediments and their formation, and the chemical composition of geological materials, respectively. Combining them helps reconstruct both ancient organisms and their environments.

Body fossils and molecular biomarkers

Body fossils preserve remains or impressions of organisms. Molecular biomarkers are chemical traces of biological molecules that can provide evidence of ancient life even without recognisable bodies.

Proterozoic eon

The interval from approximately 2.5 billion to 539 million years ago, encompassing much of the early history of eukaryotic life.

Neoproterozoic era

The final part of the Proterozoic, approximately 1 billion to 539 million years ago. The researchers propose that eukaryotes expanded substantially into planktonic habitats during this interval.

The research also illustrates something creationist caricatures of science routinely overlook: scientists continually test their explanations against evidence. Discoveries of living eukaryotes capable of surviving without oxygen, together with evidence that ancient seas were widely oxygen-poor, had raised questions about whether the earliest eukaryotes needed oxygen at all. To investigate, the researchers turned to rock cores drilled decades ago during mineral exploration and subsequently stored in Darwin. They examined more than 12,000 microfossils and analysed the sediments and their chemistry to reconstruct the organisms’ habitats. Old collections, approached with new questions, can still yield major discoveries.

The resulting pattern was revealing. Eukaryotic fossils occurred almost exclusively in sediments deposited beneath oxygenated waters, whereas sediments from oxygen-free settings still preserved other microbial fossils. Their distribution suggests that these early eukaryotes used oxygen and probably lived on the seabed. The researchers also propose that a much later expansion into planktonic habitats helped shape subsequent diversification. This connects evolutionary history with the availability of suitable environments: the opportunities for complex organisms to flourish depended on the physical and chemical conditions around them.

This does not establish every step in the origin of the eukaryotic cell, nor demonstrate that one particular rise in oxygen directly caused its appearance. It does strengthen the evidence that oxygen availability constrained early eukaryotic habitats. The broader picture is one of evolution unfolding within a changing planet, with environmental conditions opening opportunities and imposing limits. There is no requirement here for foresight or a predetermined destination.

Creationists may welcome any suggestion that scientists are reassessing an earlier interpretation, but the revision offers them no chronological refuge. Whether these organisms inhabited the seabed or drifted in the water, and precisely how they used oxygen, are questions within an ancient evolutionary history. Reconsidering those details does not compress that history into a biblical timetable. Science advances because its explanations remain answerable to evidence; a chronology fixed in advance can survive only by refusing the evidence that contradicts it.

In the following article from The Conversation, reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, researchers Maxwell Lechte and Leigh Anne Riedman explain what these tiny fossils reveal about the early evolution of complex life.

Published: May 21, 2026 12.08am BST

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion‑year‑old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life

Drill cores of sedimentary rock which contains microscopic fossils.

Maxwell Lechte

Maxwell Lechte, University of Sydney and Leigh Anne Riedman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Stored in an open-air warehouse in tropical Darwin, Australia, are dozens of trays containing cylindrical cores of rock. They are from drill holes bored hundreds of metres below the surface by mineral exploration companies decades ago.

Some of these cores at the Northern Territory Geological Survey are mudstone – a type of sedimentary rock formed from hardened seafloor mud. The companies that drilled these cores were largely unaware that within these mudstones were fossils of microscopic organisms buried on the seafloor of an ancient inland sea that covered much of northern Australia over 1.5 billion years ago.

As our new study, published today in Nature, shows, these fossils are crucial for addressing a longstanding puzzle about the major evolutionary leap that led to all complex life on Earth: the origin of eukaryotes.

Layers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory.

Maxwell Lechte

Small but complex

All life on Earth can be placed into one of two types which are fundamentally different at the cellular level.

Prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) have simple cellular organisation and are mostly single celled. Eukaryotes – including all animals, plants, algae and fungi – are very different. They have much more complicated cells featuring a nucleus and other specialised structures such as organelles which perform specific jobs.

The eukaryotic revolution transformed the planet. It led to the rise of animals and, eventually, to us. Based on observations from the genes of living organisms, it is now widely agreed that the last common ancestor of all living eukaryotes resulted from the symbiotic union of (at least) two prokaryotic microbes: an archaeon and a bacterium.

The first evidence for eukaryotic life comes in the form of these fossils of single-celled organisms. They show a level of cellular complexity not seen among prokaryotes, but common in eukaryotes.

Eukaryote fossils can be found around the world in rocks dating back at least 1.5 billion years. The fossils of the Northern Territory, the oldest of which date back to 1.75 billion years ago, are the oldest currently known eukaryote fossils globally.

But the ancient world in which early eukaryotes evolved remains shrouded in mystery. And so many fundamental aspects regarding their nature are unknown.

Oxygen – friend or foe?

Many types of bacteria can live and grow in places without oxygen. But nearly all eukaryotes alive today use oxygen for their survival. That’s because aerobic respiration – breaking down food using oxygen – provides the vast amounts of energy that complex life demands.

But the idea that oxygen has always been beneficial for all eukaryotes has come under fire in recent years. This follows the surprising discoveries of enigmatic eukaryotes that can thrive in conditions without oxygen.

There is also mounting evidence from the geological record that when eukaryotes were first evolving, oxygen was likely much scarcer. This means oxygen-free marine habitats would have been the norm. Collectively, these observations have called into question the assumption eukaryotes have depended on oxygen since their inception.

Genetic studies of living microbes belonging to groups considered closest to the ancestors of the first eukaryote can offer key insights into eukaryote ancestry. But only the fossil record can tell us about long-extinct lineages. And only geology can offer a window into the kind of world these organisms lived in.

Fossils of single-celled eukaryotic organisms with complex surface features such as extensions and plates.

Leigh Anne Riedman

More than 12,000 fossils

For our new study, we crushed up samples of the mudstone cores stored in Darwin, then dissolved them. We identified more than 12,000 fossils by analysing the organic residue left behind by this dissolution under a microscope.

We also studied the mudstones the fossils were preserved in to better understand what the environment was like when the sediments were deposited. This offered insight about the habitats in which these eukaryotes lived. And by analysing the chemistry of these mudstones, we could determine whether oxygen was present in the ancient seawater.

Our results show that eukaryote fossils were found in environments ranging from coastal mudflats to the open sea. But they were present only in samples deposited in oxygenated settings. Samples from oxygen-free environments contained only simple, prokaryotic forms.

This suggests that even the oldest known eukaryotes that lived on Earth 1.7 to 1.4 billion years ago were dependent on oxygen. These data lend support to a long-held hypothesis that oxygen played a key role in driving the evolution of early eukaryotes.

Resolving the drivers and context of the major evolutionary leap represented by early eukaryotes is one of the major outstanding questions in the life sciences. Ongoing studies of these enigmatic, ancient microfossils will no doubt tell us more about our own origins – and our place in the cosmos.
Maxwell Lechte, Research Associate in Geobiology, University of Sydney and Leigh Anne Riedman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Abstract
The evolution of the eukaryotic cell paved the way for the emergence of all complex life on Earth. Despite its significance, the environmental context of early eukaryote evolution is largely unknown^1,2. Here we use the geological record to reconstruct the habitats of the oldest known fossil eukaryotes, approximately 1.75–1.4 billion years old. Our integrated palaeontological, sedimentological and geochemical analyses show that although fossil eukaryotes are found in samples deposited in a range of environments from coastal to offshore, they are almost entirely restricted to those from settings with oxygenated bottom waters. This distribution suggests these organisms were aerobes (obligate, facultative and/or microaerophilic) and, given their size and morphological complexity, probably possessed mitochondria. Furthermore, their near absence from otherwise fossiliferous anoxic samples suggests a benthic habit, as planktonic eukaryotes would be expected to be present in both oxic and anoxic samples. We propose that eukaryotes were largely restricted to oxic benthic habitats for much of the Proterozoic eon, only expanding into planktonic habitats during the Neoproterozoic era (1–0.54 billion years ago). This late ecological expansion could account for the mismatch between the appearance of eukaryotic body fossils and molecular biomarkers³ and explain the stepwise increase in eukaryote diversity during the Neoproterozoic era⁴.

Lechte, M.A., Riedman, L.A., Porter, S.M. et al.
Early fossil eukaryotes were benthic aerobes.
Nature 655, 670–675 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10533-4

©2026 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For young-Earth creationism, the fundamental problem remains the chronology. These microscopic organisms inhabited Earth more than a billion years before the supposed biblical creation. Debates about their metabolism or preferred habitat cannot make that immense span of time disappear. There is no evidence-based reconciliation between this geological history and a world only a few thousand years old; preserving the latter requires rejecting the former.

The study also illustrates how science progresses. Researchers revisit specimens, question assumptions and combine different kinds of evidence to distinguish between competing explanations. Whether early eukaryotes depended on oxygen is a question to investigate, not a doctrine to defend. Revising an interpretation in response to evidence strengthens our understanding; it does not render every alternative explanation equally credible.

What emerges is a history in which the evolution and distribution of complex life were constrained by environmental conditions. Oxygen availability helped determine where these early eukaryotes could flourish, while subsequent ecological expansion offered further opportunities for diversification. This does not mean that oxygen alone explains the origin of complex cells, but it places their history firmly within the workings of a changing natural world.

There is no need to imagine those ancient seas being prepared with humans in mind. Evolution has no foresight: organisms survive and reproduce under the conditions they encounter, and their descendants inherit the consequences. These tiny fossils preserve evidence of that long, contingent history — a history we can reconstruct by examining the rocks, rather than insisting that the rocks conform to an ancient creation story.

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Creationism Refuted - Bats Evolved In Europe - 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree | University of St Andrews news

Corynorhinus townsendii.

Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Bats present creationists with a multitude of problems: firstly, there is the fact that they have a vastly more effective immune system than humans, so creationists need to explain why an omnibenevolent creator god would not give his favourite special creation, humans, the best available immune system. Secondly, there is the famous Bible blunder where, in most English language translations, bats appear to have been classified as birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) by the ignorant people who wrote it.

Now the facts have become even more difficult in the form of an awkward combination: remarkable adaptations that invite declarations of “design”, and an evolutionary history that researchers can investigate using evidence. Calling a bat a specially created “kind” explains neither its relationships with other bats nor when and where those relationships arose. Those are questions that require fossils, genomes and testable hypotheses.

Now, a major international study, published in Nature, has brought these questions into sharper focus. Researchers working within the Bat1K consortium assembled genomic data from 103 species, representing all 21 recognised living bat families, and combined this resource with anatomical evidence from 44 fossil bats. The university summarises their findings as pointing to a European origin for bats and mammalian powered flight around 65 million years ago — tens of millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week” of young-Earth creationism.

The research reconstructs a branching history of ancestry, migration and diversification. Its geographical model favours Europe as the ancestral region, followed by dispersal into Africa and subsequent expansion into other continents. These are historical inferences that can be tested and revised as further evidence becomes available.

The study also sheds light on echolocation: the ability to use returning echoes to detect surroundings and prey. The inferred position of the extinct bat Vielasia supports the conclusion that laryngeal echolocation — using calls generated in the voice box — arose before the diversification of the group containing all living bats. This places another celebrated bat adaptation deep within their evolutionary history.

Creationism Refuted - 'Jumping Genes' Create New Functional Genetic Information - No Magic needed.

Eciton vagans, with lava from a raided wasp nest.

By Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA Spoils of the raid, CC BY 2.0, Link

Ants look back on an evolutionary story of success. The photo shows workers of the Asian weaver ant.

© Lukas Schrader

“Jumping genes” helped ants in their evolutionary triumph after the extinction of the dinosaurs

One of creationism’s favourite assertions is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” without an intelligent designer. What usually goes missing is a clear definition of information, an explanation of why known genetic mechanisms cannot generate novelty, or any evidence of the supposed designer doing anything. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists continue to investigate the natural processes by which genomes change and organisms acquire new capabilities. A new study of ants provides another example of how productive that scientific approach can be.

As reported in Science Advances, an international team led by Dr Lukas Schrader has investigated the contribution of transposable elements, commonly called “jumping genes”, to ant evolution. These mobile DNA sequences can move or copy themselves within genomes. Their activity can be disruptive, but it can also supply material for evolutionary innovation. The research links their activity to the expansion of gene families, including those encoding the odour receptors so important to ants’ chemical communication.

The researchers compared genomes from 163 ant species, representing twelve of the sixteen living subfamilies. They identified independent bursts of transposable-element activity in the ancestors of major ant groups, preceding their rapid diversification following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene, or K–Pg, mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago. The findings support a connection between changes within genomes and the evolutionary opportunities created by a profoundly altered world.

The evolutionary significance is straightforward. A mass extinction changes the conditions under which survivors live: ecological relationships are disrupted, resources become available in different ways, and opportunities arise as ecosystems recover. A genetic variant that previously offered little advantage may become useful under these new conditions. Natural selection can then favour organisms carrying it. Neither the mutation nor the environmental upheaval needs to anticipate the outcome.

Nor does genetic novelty require a complete, finished gene to appear from nowhere. Duplication supplies additional copies of existing sequences, which can subsequently diverge; changes to the regulation and arrangement of DNA can also alter what an organism does. Calling the starting material “existing information” does nothing to prevent its descendants from acquiring new functions. The relevant questions concern what changed, how it changed, and what consequences followed—not whether creationists are willing to call the result “information”.

Here, the specific finding is an association between mobile DNA, expanding gene families and subsequent diversification. It should not be inflated into a claim that every extra receptor acquired a demonstrated new function, or that the asteroid impact directly produced particular beneficial mutations. Nevertheless, the study supplies evidence for a natural route connecting genomic change with evolutionary diversification, precisely where the creationist argument substitutes an assertion of impossibility.

For young-Earth creationists, there is the additional inconvenience of the timescale. This diversification followed an extinction event some 66 million years ago—thousands of times further into the past than their entire supposed history of the Universe allows. Ant evolution was already unfolding in a world unimaginably ancient by biblical standards. What emerges is a history of genetic change, environmental catastrophe and opportunities exploited by surviving lineages, without foresight or a predetermined destination.

Fine-Tuned Fallacy Exposed - Earth Fine-Tuned For Regular Mass Extinctions - Malevolence, Incompetence Or Nature?

AI-generated impression of the End-Permian extinction

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AI-generated impression of the End-Permian mass extinction.

UNM researcher helps uncover recurring climate regimes linked to elevated extinction risk | UNM UCAM Newsroom

One of the more ridiculous of creationist claims is that Earth was perfectly ‘fine-tuned’ for life by an omniscient, omnibenevolent designer. Ridiculous because a mere glance at the reality should tell them that natural disasters such as earthquakes, seismic activity and flash-floods regularly devastate huge areas and kill vast numbers of people. The rose-tinted view requires a remarkably selective reading of the planet’s history: admire the organisms alive today, but overlook the environmental upheavals that wiped out so many of their predecessors. A world capable of supporting life is not necessarily a world designed to protect it, and the geological record provides abundant evidence of that distinction.

New research, paper, published in Nature Communications, adds another dimension to this problem. An international team, including UNM palaeobiologist Corinne “Cori” Myers, examined approximately 539 million years of Earth’s history and identified five major, persistent ‘mega-climate’ regimes. Transitions between these regimes were associated with heightened vulnerability in the biosphere and elevated extinction risk. The history emerging from this analysis is one of prolonged climatic states punctuated by potentially dangerous reorganisations.

The study brings together carbon and oxygen isotope records, statistical analyses and a conceptual model of the interacting climate and carbon cycle. The researchers compared the environmental patterns with a measure of biological vulnerability incorporating fossil diversity and the rates at which groups appeared and disappeared. Their findings suggest that the consequences of an environmental disturbance depend partly on the state of the planetary system it affects: a perturbation can help push that system into a different regime, with serious consequences for its inhabitants.

This does not establish that every mass extinction had the same cause, or that each climate transition inevitably produced one. Volcanism, asteroid impacts and their associated environmental effects remain essential parts of the explanation. The study instead offers a broader framework for understanding why some episodes of disruption coincided with particularly severe biological crises. Its central finding concerns an association between changing climate–carbon regimes and increased vulnerability, rather than a single universal extinction mechanism.

For the creationist argument, however, the difficulty is plain. If Earth’s suitability for living organisms is to count as evidence of benevolent design, what are we to make of its capacity to become catastrophically unsuitable for organisms already living here? Invoking a designer’s concern for life while dismissing the destruction of entire evolutionary lineages is an exercise in choosing the evidence to fit the conclusion. Survival receives the credit; extinction disappears into the small print.

Creationism Refuted - The History Of Viticulture - Uninterrupted By A Global Genocide

AI-Generated image of wine-making in Iberia, 3000 Years ago

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Grape seeds from Huelva, Vitis vinifera L.

Image: Guillem Pérez Jordà.

Ancient DNA reveals that the first grapevines cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula arrived from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago

If fruit-bearing plants were created for human use by an omnipotent, omniscient god, why have humans spent thousands of years modifying them to suit our needs? Genesis 1:29 presents seed-bearing plants and fruit trees as divine provisions for humanity, yet agriculture tells a rather different story: people taking what nature supplied and, through cultivation and selection, producing crops better suited to their purposes. Grapevines provide another example of this gap between the claim of providential design and the biological history of our food.

Research published in Current Biology, traces part of that history through ancient DNA. An international team analysed 28 archaeological grape seeds from Iberia and Sardinia. Their findings indicate that cultivated vines of eastern Mediterranean ancestry reached Iberia approximately 3,000 years ago, associated with Phoenician settlement and trade. These were already domesticated plants, arriving in a landscape where wild grapevines also grew.

The imported vines subsequently crossed with local wild populations. This mixing contributed to the ancestry of traditional Iberian varieties, with characteristic lineages already identifiable in seeds from the fourth century BCE. Ancient DNA also revealed connections between medieval seeds and varieties preserved today. The record therefore contains both change and continuity: new combinations of ancestry alongside lineages maintained across centuries.

More worryingly for Bible-literalist creationist, the genetic evidence shows that viticulture (the cultivation and growing of grapes) has a continuous history from before 'Creation Week' through the mythical global flood and biological reset of Earth, right up to the present, with no evidence of interruption of either the culturally-inherited methods or of the grape varieties used.

This is a useful illustration of how evolution works. Populations do not have to acquire all their useful variation through new mutations arising on the spot. Reproduction can reshuffle existing variation, while interbreeding brings together genetic variants from previously separated populations. Cultivation then provides opportunities for people to retain and propagate plants with desirable characteristics. Human preferences influence which vines reproduce or are multiplied, but the inheritance and variation on which that selection acts are ordinary biological processes.

Creationism Refuted - Relative Bone Strengths Adds More Evidence Of Human Evolution

Image: Cullen Townsend

On the right is a depiction of an early Homo human ancestor characterized by relatively greater bone strength of the femur in the thigh compared to the humerus in the arm. To the left is a depiction of an older human ancestor, Australopithecus, characterized by more equivalent strength in the bones of the arm and thigh.

Image: Cullen Townsend

Study of bone strength reveals new clues about human evolution | EurekAlert!

One of the persistent problems for creationism is that our ancestors left evidence of their existence millions of years before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Worse still for the claim that humans were created separately from the other apes, those ancestors possessed combinations of characteristics that make sense as stages in an evolutionary history. The creationist insistence that a fossil must be either “just an ape” or “fully human” cannot accommodate the very mixtures of ancestral and derived features that evolution predicts.

A new study published in Science Advances adds another piece to this picture. Led by Kristian J. Carlson of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, the researchers examined CT scans of limb bones from seven fossil hominins, dating from approximately 3.7 million to 1.5 million years ago. By analysing the structure of their bone shafts, they estimated resistance to bending and twisting and compared strength across the limbs.
Bone responds to the mechanical loads placed upon it during life, so its internal structure offers clues to habitual activity. In the sampled Australopithecus individuals, relatively strong upper arms suggest substantial climbing, while the relationship between thigh-bone and shin-bone strength was more human-like. Early Homo, by contrast, showed relatively stronger thighs compared with upper arms, consistent with greater reliance on terrestrial walking. These findings support a change in locomotor behaviour, although seven individuals cannot establish every step or the precise pace of that transition.

The evolutionary significance lies in the combination. Upright walking could coexist with continued use of the trees: acquiring one capability did not require the immediate abandonment of another. An ancestor with this mixture was a functioning animal in its own environment, with no need to anticipate the anatomy or lifestyle of its distant descendants. Evolution has no destination, and modern humans were never a goal towards which these populations were consciously or inevitably progressing.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological difficulty is equally stark. Even the youngest fossils examined are about 150 times older than a generously extended 10,000-year biblical chronology. Their bone structure provides evidence about how these individuals lived; their geological ages place those lives in a past that the creationist narrative simply does not allow. Together, they present a much more substantial account of human origins than an assertion that fully formed humans appeared by supernatural decree a few thousand years ago.

Creationism Refuted - 55-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Eggshells From Queensland, Australia

AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia

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AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia.

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55 million years: Australia’s oldest crocodile eggshells found in Queensland

A major problem for young-Earth creationists is that so much of Earth’s history occurred millions or billions of years before their biblical chronology allows the planet to have existed. Fossils repeatedly confront them with evidence of animals living, reproducing and evolving in worlds that supposedly never existed. Dismissing this evidence as scientific incompetence or dishonesty does nothing to explain it. Nor does accusing researchers of manipulating dates become an acceptable substitute for evidence simply because the accusation is made in defence of the Bible.

The latest addition to this inconvenient record comes from approximately 55-million-year-old crocodilian eggshells found at Murgon in south-eastern Queensland, Australia. These animals were laying eggs more than 5,000 times further back in time than even a generous 10,000-year creationist chronology permits. The fragments are described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by an international team including Michael Stein of the University of New South Wales.

The oldest known crocodilian eggshells from Australia, they are attributed to the mekosuchines, an extinct group with a long evolutionary history in the region. These crocodilians belonged to a different branch of the family tree from Australia’s living saltwater and freshwater crocodiles. Their significance therefore extends beyond their inconvenient age: they help document an ancient crocodilian fauna that cannot simply be equated with the species inhabiting Australia today.

Eggshells also preserve information that bones and teeth alone cannot provide. Their microscopic structure offers clues to reproduction and nesting conditions; in this case, the researchers interpret the evidence as indicating nesting around the margins of an ancient lake. These tiny fragments therefore add another dimension to our understanding of how extinct crocodilians lived and interacted with their environment.

The broader evolutionary picture is one of branching lineages, ecological diversity and eventual extinction over immense spans of time. The eggshells contribute to that picture without, by themselves, revealing every evolutionary relationship or the precise identity of the animal that laid them. That distinction matters: science builds its explanations from what the evidence supports, while leaving room for further discoveries. None of that uncertainty reduces 55 million years to a few thousand.

Michael David Stein, a research associate in UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences and a co-author of the paper, describes the discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Got It Wrong Again - But It's Still Bad News For Creationists

Life reconstruction of Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda

By Gabriel Ugueto.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

Photograph of the outcrop at locality Z143 where NMT RB462 was collected

Photograph: K. Angielczyk.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

September: New species of 240-million-year-old prehistoric animal from Tanzania discovered | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists have revised their understanding of some fossils once thought to include the oldest dinosaurs. Scientists getting it wrong and having to change their minds should be music to creationist ears — until they discover what the revision actually means. The animals concerned still lived hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism. A reassessment within the Triassic does nothing to squeeze the history of life into a few thousand years.

Creationists have an almost schizophrenic attitude towards science: On the one hand they claim scientists are not allowed to publish anything which doesn't conform to some assumed scientific orthodoxy; on the other hand they point to scientific disagreement and debate and scientists even changing their mind as evidence that science is unreliable. And they readily use a computer to inform the world via the Internet that science doesn't work, without the slightest appreciation of the irony!

The research, led by Hady George of the University of Bristol and published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes a new species of dicynodont from Tanzania: Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda. Despite its name, this herbivore was a member of the mammalian evolutionary lineage, rather than a dinosaur. This discovery extends a genus previously known only from South America into Africa, around 240 million years ago.
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Creationism Refuted - The Evolution Of Domestic Dogs Began Long Before 'Creation Week'

Top The Eurasian Grey Wolf. Below a selection of its descendants. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas

Various Internet sources

More dogs

Internet sources.

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

Last November, just as I was finalising the second of my Ice Age Tales novels, two papers appeared in Science examining a subject central to their underlying theme: the long relationship between humans and the wolves whose descendants became domestic dogs. My stories are set some 30,000–40,000 years ago and imagine the beginnings of that relationship. The new research examines later chapters, revealing that substantial diversity among dogs was already established thousands of years before the intensive breeding that produced modern pedigree breeds.

The distinction matters. These papers do not show that domestication began only 11,000 years ago, nor that today’s breeds originated then. One identifies recognisably dog-like skull shapes in specimens dating to about that time, together with considerable variation among early Holocene dogs. The other traces how ancient dog populations moved and mixed alongside human communities over nearly 10,000 years. Both illuminate a prolonged history, rather than a single moment when wolves suddenly became dogs.

Earlier associations between wolves and hunter-gatherers remain possible, although neither paper establishes the particular scenario imagined in my novels. Taming an individual wolf is also different from domesticating a population: domestication involves inherited changes across generations, and behavioural changes need not coincide with readily identifiable changes in skull shape. The earliest stages of this relationship therefore remain difficult to reconstruct.

Dog domestication is, of course, a classic example of evolution under human influence. Its history presents several awkward questions for creationism, especially claims that substantial biological change is impossible and that the natural world fits a chronology of only a few thousand years.

Unintelligent Design - How The Immune System Can Go Rogue And Cause Premature Ageing

AI-generated image

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Reversing hallmarks of rapid aging by silencing a cellular alarm system

Photo credit: Eitan Moses

How the Immune System Rewrites Rapid Aging

One of the difficulties creationists have with presenting the immune system as evidence of intelligent design is explaining why something supposedly designed to protect us so often contributes to our illnesses. A defence system that can turn the body's own damaged DNA into a trigger for further damage is hardly an obvious example of competent, benevolent engineering. It is, however, entirely understandable as a product of evolution: a collection of mechanisms favoured for their benefits, constrained by their history, and carrying costs that natural selection has never eliminated.

Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provides a revealing example. In a paper published in Genes & Development, Marva Bergman and colleagues investigated how a DNA-sensing protein called cGAS contributes to disorders involving defective DNA repair; the body's response to genetic damage can itself become an important source of harm.

The underlying problem is straightforward. DNA appearing in the fluid surrounding a cell's nucleus can be a warning of infection. cGAS helps detect it and activates an inflammatory defence response. But the DNA need not belong to a virus: damaged cells can expose their own DNA to the same sensor. Consequently, an alarm that normally helps protect against infection can sustain inflammation even when there is no invading organism to fight. The response then risks damaging the very tissues it ordinarily helps defend.

The researchers modelled two human DNA-repair disorders, ataxia-telangiectasia and Bloom syndrome, in turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri. In the ataxia-telangiectasia model, disrupting the gene for cGAS partially alleviated reproductive defects, cellular senescence in the liver, and inflammation in the cerebellum. Several measures of genome instability also improved, consistent with cGAS having additional effects inside the nucleus, beyond its familiar inflammatory role.

There was, however, a crucial complication: losing cGAS in fish without the underlying repair defect made pathology and genome instability worse. This was therefore no demonstration that the immune system contains a universally dispensable component, nor a discovery that switching off one gene reverses normal ageing. The same protein could be beneficial or harmful depending on the biological circumstances.

That is precisely where the evolutionary explanation becomes useful. A sensor that responds to DNA in an unusual location offers a broadly effective means of detecting danger, but that signal does not identify the DNA's origin with certainty. Such a system needs safeguards and regulation, and its usefulness does not guarantee that those safeguards will work under every condition. Natural selection can preserve a mechanism whose overall benefits outweigh its costs; it cannot anticipate every future mutation or guarantee freedom from disease.

The study did not test the evolutionary history of cGAS, but its findings illustrate the kind of context-dependent compromise evolution produces. For intelligent-design advocates, the awkward question is why an allegedly perfect designer would make protection and self-inflicted damage so intimately connected. For evolutionary biology, the useful question is how that connection works—and whether understanding it can help us reduce the harm.

This is just one example of how the human body is not a work of perfect design, but the product of sub-optimal compromises constrained by contingent history and lacking in foresight, where additional layers of complexity are not hallmarks of intelligent design that creationists like to imagine, but of the need for controls and compensations for problems created by earlier iterations of the evolutionary cycle. Many more are explained in my book, The Body Of Evidence: How The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design

Refuting Creationism - Bigamous Beetles Have Better Babies - Observed Evolution Over 15 Years

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

By Udo Schmidt from Deutschland Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797) CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

One of the recurring claims of creationist apologetics is that mutations condemn living populations to relentless genetic deterioration — a supposedly inevitable decline which evolution cannot overcome. What this argument neglects is that mutations do not operate in isolation: selection influences which genetic variants pass to subsequent generations. Now, a long-running experiment with red flour beetles has provided direct genomic evidence that competition for mates can help remove harmful variants, leaving populations more resistant to extinction.

The research, led by Michael D. Pointer, of the University of East Anglia Department of Biological Sciences, described in a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), also addresses an interesting evolutionary question: why is sexual reproduction so widespread despite its considerable costs? Finding mates takes time and energy, competition can be costly, and reproduction requires contributions from individuals which do not themselves produce eggs. One possible compensating benefit is that competition for reproductive success helps prevent damaging mutations from accumulating.

The researchers tested this idea using populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, maintained under stronger or weaker sexual selection. After 156 generations, whole-genome sequencing showed that populations exposed to stronger sexual selection carried fewer genetic variants predicted to be harmful. Their overall genetic diversity, however, remained comparable. Selection had reduced the burden of damaging variants without a corresponding reduction in variation across the genome.

The distinction matters. Genetic diversity is often used as an indicator of a population’s prospects, but the amount of variation cannot tell us everything about its effects. In this experiment, the estimated burden of harmful variants was a better predictor of extinction under inbreeding than diversity alone. Populations could retain similar amounts of genetic variation while differing in their vulnerability to genetic stress.