Creationism Refuted - A Newly-Discovered Mammal That LIve Alongside Dinosaurs - 75 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An illustration of Cimolodon desosai on the tree with a fruit in its mouth. It was about the size of a golden hamster. It likely scampered on the ground and in the trees and ate fruits and insects.

Photo: Andrey Atuchin.

Researchers discover the fossil of a new hamster-sized mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs on the Pacific Coast – UW News

Although the catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous exterminated about 75% of life on Earth, including all the non-avian dinosaurs, some small mammals survived. Among them were rodent-like multituberculates: not rodents, but an extinct and highly successful group of mammals that had already lived alongside dinosaurs for more than 100 million years. One newly identified member of that group was a small mammal, about the size of a golden hamster, described in a recent paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The people who made up the creation myths in the Bible could have known nothing of this, of course. As their stories show, theirs was a narrow, parochial view of the world, centred on a small part of the Middle East and on the folk history of one people. Their modern legacy is a movement of equally incurious believers who treat those ancient stories as real history and their creation fantasy as real science. Consequently, the evidence revealed by palaeontologists is almost invariably too awkward for them to acknowledge honestly.

Sadly, creationists continue trying to boost their dwindling numbers, and soothe their fragile egos, by demanding the right to indoctrinate children at public expense. Behind that demand lies the curious belief that falsehoods become less false if enough people can be persuaded to believe them. The facts themselves are of little consequence. What matters is recruitment: encouraging ignorance, anti-science conspiracism and belief in magic, while leaving children ill-equipped to evaluate evidence, understand complex data, or perhaps become the scientists society will need in the future.

Nevertheless, the facts remain what they are, regardless of who accepts them. In this case, a research team led by the University of Washington has identified a new 75-million-year-old species of Cimolodon from a fossil discovered at a research site in Baja California, Mexico. The species, named Cimolodon desosai, was about the size of a golden hamster and probably scampered both on the ground and in trees, feeding on fruit and insects.

Creationism Refuted - Amazingly Detailed Fossils From Australia - 11-16 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A large trapdoor spider preserved in McGraths Flat.

Michael Frese

Unusual red rocks in Australia are rewriting the rules on exceptional fossil sites

A research paper published online last year in Gondwana Research should have been giving creationists nightmares. It reports work by an Australian and American team of palaeontologists and geologists, led by Tara Djokic of the Australian Museum and UNSW Sydney, showing how iron-rich minerals can preserve fossils in such exquisite detail that individual pigment cells in fish eyes, internal organs of insects and fish, and even delicate spider hairs and nerve cells can be seen in deposits dated to between 11 million and 16 million years old.

The fossils come from McGraths Flat, a Miocene rainforest lake deposit in New South Wales, where organisms were entombed not in the usual shale, sandstone or limestone, but in iron-rich ferricrete composed largely of the iron-oxyhydroxide mineral goethite. Instead of destroying delicate biological structures, as might have been expected, the iron-rich sediment preserved them in astonishing microscopic detail.

This is not the first time iron has been shown to play an important role in preserving soft tissues rather than just the hard bones and teeth that normally fossilise. It was also implicated in Mary Schweitzer’s famous discovery of preserved collagen and soft-tissue-like structures in dinosaur fossils — a discovery that creationists frequently misrepresent today as “proof” that dinosaurs were alive only a few thousand years ago. Despite repeated corrections of these claims, creationist accounts of Schweitzer’s work have grown ever more fanciful with the passage of time, and now routinely include assertions that she found fresh blood and that the tissue was carbon-dated to just a few thousand years old.

In reality, the “fresh blood” claim is a distortion. Schweitzer described microscopic red structures that resembled blood cells, but their appearance was the starting point for a scientific investigation, not a claim that liquid blood had survived for millions of years. Nor was there any question of carbon dating, which is not used to date dinosaur fossils of this age. Schweitzer herself, writing in Scientific American, explained that the scientifically interesting question was not whether the fossil was young, but what chemical processes could allow traces of original biological material to persist for tens of millions of years.

The new paper extends that understanding by showing another way in which soft tissues can be preserved in remarkable detail over deep time. In favourable conditions, microscopic particles of iron-oxyhydroxide, each only about 0.005 millimetres across, can enter tissues and cells before decay destroys them, replicating delicate structures at cellular and even subcellular scales.

How this was discovered, and why it matters for palaeontology, is explained in an article in The Conversation by Tara Djokic. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Why Snakes, Like Creationists, Don't Have A Leg To Stand On - Evolution

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

An ancient snake's cheekbone sheds light on evolution of modern snake skulls | Faculty of Science

Creationism is the art of ignoring evidence while pretending to be interested in it. Creationists continually demand that science provide supporting evidence for their childish parodies of evolution, abiogenesis, the Big Bang, and other scientific explanations; then, when the evidence is provided, they either ignore it, misrepresent it, or move the goalposts.

This is neatly illustrated by a paper published in Science Advances in 2019 by an international team of palaeontologists, including researchers from Argentina, the University of Alberta and McGill University. The paper provides creationists with something they are forever pretending to ask for — a transitional fossil — while also undermining another of their favourite assertions: that evolutionary change must always involve adding something new, and that loss or reduction cannot contribute to evolution.

The fossil in question belongs to Najash rionegrina, a rear-limbed fossil snake from Argentina. The presence of hind limbs is striking enough, but it is not the most important point of the paper. The fossil also shows that, during snake evolution, legs were not the only structures to be reduced or lost. The skull of Najash still retained a cheekbone — the jugal bone — which has almost entirely disappeared in living snakes.

That matters because it helps refine our understanding of how the modern snake skull evolved. Rather than appearing suddenly, fully formed and magically snake-like, the snake body plan was assembled over time through a series of anatomical changes, including elongation of the body, reduction of limbs, modification of the skull, and the loss or reduction of bones that were present in earlier ancestors. In other words, this is exactly the kind of transitional evidence creationists claim not to have seen, and exactly the kind of evolutionary reduction they claim cannot happen.

How Science Works - 'Miniature Dinosaur' Fossils Identified As Baby Ankylosaurs

Liaoningosaurus paradoxus

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Numerous fossils of Liaoningosaurus paradoxus have so far been discovered.

© Zheng et al. 2025

First armoured dinosaur hatchling discovered in China | Natural History Museum.

Unlike fundamentalist belief systems such as creationism, in which facts are either forced to fit sacred dogma or dismissed with ad hoc excuses, science readily incorporates new information and adjusts its understanding accordingly. That process was neatly illustrated by the paper published in September 2025 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which reported a reassessment of fossils from China first described in 2001.

These fossils were initially classified as belonging to a miniature armoured ankylosaur named Liaoningosaurus paradoxus. Since then, more specimens have been found, but none exceeds 40 cm in length, which is strikingly odd for ankylosaurs, a group whose members were typically around 3 metres or more long.

Where creationism would brush aside anomalies like this with a shrug and a retreat into theology, muttering about ‘mysterious ways’ or ‘tests’, science treats them as clues that something is not yet fully understood. The existence of these fossils pointed to something that had yet to be properly integrated into our knowledge of ankylosaurs, requiring scientists to refine either their understanding of the animals themselves or of the fossils attributed to them.

Now, a re-examination by a team of four palaeontologists, including Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, has shown that these specimens were not miniature adults at all, but baby ankylosaurs. That makes them the youngest ankylosaurs yet discovered. There is still much to learn, because no adult Liaoningosaurus paradoxus has yet been found. Even so, these hatchling fossils add significantly to our understanding of how ankylosaurs developed.

Creationism Refuted - More Evidence For Creationists To Prove Their Faith is Strong With - By Ignoring It.

Ptychotherates bucculentus in Late Triassic New Mexico.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Artistic rendition of Ptychotherates bucculentus.

Illustration by Megan Sodano for Virginia Tech.

Student identifies new meat-eating dinosaur three times older than T. rex | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech Another fossil; another piece of awkward evidence for creationists to ignore. This time, it is reported in the journal Papers in Palaeontology.

The fossil is of an ancestral dinosaur from the Late Triassic, about three times older than Tyrannosaurus rex, dating from an era when dinosaurs had not yet risen to dominance and were still competing with the ancestors of crocodiles and mammals. It was the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic that cleared the way for the dinosaurs, just as their own extinction at the end of the Cretaceous later cleared the way for mammals and birds.

For creationists, the fact that all this unfolded over a vast span of time long before the supposed creation of the small, flat world of Biblical mythology is simply one more test of how much evidence they are prepared to ignore. Unlike science, which stands or falls by the evidence, creationism seems to draw strength from defying it. The greater the weight of evidence against it, the more loudly its followers proclaim their faith to be unshaken. So while creationists on social media endlessly demand that science prove its case to an impossible standard, and try to pass misinformation or ignorance off as “proof” of creationism, they routinely dismiss real evidence and treat stubborn refusal to change their minds as a kind of victory. In creationist circles, winning a debate too often seems to mean not changing one’s mind, even when the facts leave no honest alternative.

This latest inconvenience for creationism comes from Virginia Tech, where student Simba Srivastava succeeded in reconstructing fragments of a dinosaur skull embedded in rock from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. The fossil had originally been unearthed in 1982, but was later rediscovered in a drawer at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History by palaeontologist Sterling Nesbitt. Back at Virginia Tech, Srivastava used computed tomography scan data to create a 3D print of the skull, revealing that it belonged to a previously unknown species of early dinosaur.

Refuting Creationism - Another Gap Shrinks And It's More Bad News For Creationists

Helicolocellus cantori in an Ediacaran sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Helicolocellus cantori in an Ediacaran sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Virginia Tech researcher's team discovers 'missing' sea sponges | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

Scientists have narrowed another gap in the fossil record and, as usual, no gods were found. The gap concerned the long interval between the time molecular-clock analyses suggest sponges first evolved in the Neoproterozoic, perhaps around 700 million years ago, and the earliest widely accepted sponge fossils from the early Cambrian. That gap has now been pushed back into the Late Ediacaran by Virginia Tech geobiologist a paper in Nature.

Creationists normally delight in gaps in the fossil record because they think Darwin somehow “admitted” that missing links were fatal to his theory. In reality, Darwin was doing what honest scientists do: openly acknowledging the limitations of the evidence available in 1859. The key point is that he was writing about the state of knowledge then, not in 2026. Since Darwin’s day, the Theory of Evolution has not only provided a framework for understanding the history of life; it has also told scientists what sort of evidence to look for and where to look for it. As a result, palaeontologists now have access to vastly more fossils than Darwin could ever have imagined, together with genetic evidence and radiometric dating methods that did not exist in his lifetime. More fossils are being found almost daily and invariably confirm the Theory of Evolution.

And those gaps continue to shrink, almost always to the discomfort of creationists, because they so often concern events hundreds of millions, even billions, of years before the narrow timescale allowed by biblical literalism. This fossil is especially awkward for them because it further undermines the familiar creationist misrepresentation of the Cambrian “Explosion” as a sudden, magical appearance of multiple body plans with no ancestry. Instead, this Late Ediacaran sponge adds to the growing evidence that the Cambrian diversification was preceded by a long evolutionary prelude, in which animals were already emerging and diversifying before the Cambrian began. Far from an abrupt act of creation, the picture is one of gradual evolutionary change over immense spans of time, as the largely sessile Ediacaran world gave way to the more active and ecologically complex Cambrian one.

How Science Works - And Why Religion Doesn't - Changing Its Mind When The Evidence Changes

[left caption]

[right caption]

Pohlsepia mazonensis PE51727a (part) and PE51727b (counterpart).

Oldest octopus fossil is no octopus at all scans reveal - University of Reading

The excitement creationists may feel on hearing that science has got it wrong yet again because a fossil once classified as the oldest known octopus has now been reidentified, will no doubt be tempered by the awkward fact that the animal it really belonged to lived 300 million years before, according to their beliefs, there was even a universe, let alone life on Earth. As so often, the truth poses no problem for science; it is creationism that stumbles over it.

Far from showing that science is unreliable compared with the supposed ‘eternal truth’ of religion, this revision is a vindication of the scientific method and a demonstration of its self-correcting nature. Unlike religions, which cling to ‘sacred truths’ that, when tested against reality, turn out to be little more than the best guesses and campfire tales of our ignorant and fearful ancestors, science is a method for moving ever closer to the truth. It remains the best tool we have for discovering reality precisely because nothing is sacred except truth itself, and because scientific understanding is always provisional — open to revision whenever new evidence demands it, unlike religions which are doxastically and doctrinally closed to new information.

On this occasion, the fossil re-examined and found not to be what it was once thought to be was the famous Pohlsepia mazonensis, identified as an octopus 25 years ago and even entered in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest known fossil octopus. Using modern synchrotron imaging to peer inside the fossil and reveal details the original investigators could not see, researchers discovered tiny teeth and other internal features showing that it was not an octopus at all, but a nautiloid — a cephalopod with an external shell. The team recently published their findings in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B.

Refuting Creationism - Transitional Fossils From Before The Cambrian 'Explosion'

A newly-discovered fossil from the Jiangchuan biota.

Credit: Gaorong Li.

Reconstruction of Jiangchuan biota

Credit: Xiaodong Wang.

Spectacular fossil treasure trove pushes back origins of complex animals | University of Oxford

A paper just published in Science by a team of palaeontologists from Oxford and Yunnan universities should, if creationists were honest enough and sufficiently knowledgeable to understand it, finally lay to rest two favourite canards they use to attack Darwinian evolution: the so-called Cambrian Explosion and their misrepresentation of Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium.

The Cambrian Explosion is a favourite target for creationists, who exploit the word “explosion” to misrepresent it as the sudden appearance of multicellular life with multiple body plans, supposedly without ancestry, and therefore as a single act of supernatural creation. The fact that it happened some 535 million years ago is usually dismissed with the standard creationist repertoire: claims that scientists are inventing the dates, relying on “flawed” dating techniques, or, more bizarrely still, failing to take account of some unspecified change in radioactive decay rates that just happens to make 6,000–10,000 years look like 535 million.

But that fallacy was based on very limited data, especially the fossils from the Burgess Shale, which provided only a narrow snapshot of living organisms at one time and place. From evidence such as this, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge developed the idea of punctuated equilibrium, in which long periods of relative stasis in the fossil record are interrupted by comparatively short episodes of more rapid evolutionary change. Creationists eagerly seized on this, dishonestly presenting it as though Gould had somehow replaced Darwinism and proved Darwin wrong. In reality, it did no such thing. It was not a rejection of evolution, nor of common descent, nor of natural selection, but a discussion within evolutionary biology about the pattern and tempo with which evolutionary change appears in the fossil record.

Darwin, of course, never claimed that evolution must proceed at a constant, steady rate. On the contrary, his theory makes it clear that changing environments drive evolutionary change, so more rapid evolution during periods of environmental upheaval is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution and, indeed, a vindication of it. The appearance of long stasis followed by apparently abrupt change can also be exaggerated by the incompleteness of the geological record, in which spans of thousands of years may appear almost instantaneous when compressed into a thin layer of rock.

However, the notion that the Cambrian Explosion was a sudden event without ancestry has been steadily dismantled by discoveries pushing the origins of Cambrian-type biota back towards the Ediacaran, together with evidence that some Ediacaran organisms were already capable of movement. What emerges is not a miraculous burst of creation, but a clear evolutionary progression from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian.

Now this new paper strengthens that case by showing that complex body plans existed much earlier than previously thought, and by presenting evidence of gradual Darwinian evolution from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian.

The evidence comes from a treasure trove of fossils, the Jiangchuan Biota in Yunnan Province, southwest China, where more than 700 fossil specimens were recovered from rocks dated to between 554 and 539 million years old. Among the more surprising finds is a deuterostome — part of the broad group that includes vertebrates such as fish and humans.

Refuting Creationism - The Oldest Known Ancestor of Spiders - 500 Million Years Ago

Head of Megachelicerax cousteaui

Credit: Rudy Lerosey-Aubril.

Close up of chelicera

Credit: Rudy Lerosey-Aubril.

A 500-Million-Year-Old Clawed Predator Rewrites the Origin of Spiders and Horseshoe Crabs | Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Another day, another piece of evidence for creationists to ignore, misrepresent or simply lie about — anything, in fact, except honestly acknowledge that it shows they are wrong. This discovery strikes at the heart of creationism. It not only refutes the notion that Earth is just 6,000–10,000 years old, but also demolishes two favourite creationist misrepresentations: that there are no transitional fossils, and that the Cambrian Explosion was some sudden, magical appearance of multiple body plans with no evolutionary ancestry. Of course, creationists can always fall back on the familiar claim that scientists invented the dates to lure people away from God and convert them to “Darwinism”.

The evidence, published in Nature, is a 500-million-year-old transitional fossil showing that arthropods had already diverged to produce the chelicerate subphylum — the lineage that would eventually give rise to spiders, scorpions and horseshoe crabs. This pushes the earliest known chelicerates back by some 20 million years from the previous oldest example, dated to about 480 million years ago from the Early Ordovician Fezouata Biota of Morocco.

The crucial evidence was the presence of the defining chelicerae, identified by research scientist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril of Harvard University while microscopically cleaning a fossil arthropod that the scientists have named Megachelicerax cousteaui. Chelicerae are the pincer-like, sometimes venomous, foremost appendages that define chelicerates, in contrast to the antennae that are the foremost appendages in insects and many other arthropods.

This shows that chelicerae evolved before chelicerates acquired their later, more familiar body plan with a two-part body and the reduced head appendages that became the eight walking legs of spiders and their relatives. In other words, this fossil captures an intermediate stage between the earlier, multi-segmented arthropods and the later chelicerate body plan. It is, therefore, precisely the sort of transitional form creationists keep claiming does not exist — right up until one is found, at which point they are forced to deny, distort or ignore it.

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.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Our Ancestral Fish

Illustration of the Paleolophus swimming in ancient Asian seas.

Credit: Dr Brian Choo (Flinders University)

New pieces link fish puzzle – News

Today we have not one but two papers which together help fill a gap between the bony fishes and the first fish to venture onto land and evolve into the terrestrial tetrapods from which all land vertebrates subsequently evolved. It is a gap that presents creationists with a dilemma: it would have been a perfect god-shaped gap into which to insert their designer; however, it dates to some 410 million years ago, far too distant for their preferred timeline of 6,000–10,000 years, into which they need to try to compress the entire history of the universe.

One of these papers, just published in Canadian Journal of Zoology, is by a team from Flinders University, led by Dr Alice Clement, who have reassessed a mysterious fossil from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia using the latest technology, including CT scanning and computed tomography.

This work adds to our understanding of lungfish evolution from a key Australian fossil site that contains a diversity of lungfish fossils, including some poorly preserved specimens.

Meanwhile, Flinders University researcher Dr Brian Choo and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, have described a new fossil, Paleolophus yunnanensis (‘old crest from Yunnan’). This team's work has just been published in Current Biology.

Paleolophus helps fill the gap between ancestral lungfish and their diversification a few million years later; in other words, it is one more example of the sort of transitional form that creationists insist does not exist: yet another so-called 'missing link'.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence For Earliest Large Land Predators - 280 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study finds earliest evidence of big land predators hunting plant-eaters | EurekAlert

Contradicting creationist claims that death entered the world when Eve's sin somehow transformed a previously perfect world into a fallen one—with the creator god apparently powerless to prevent some other magical entity interfering in its creation—we now have evidence of predation; that is, the killing and eating of one living organism by another. Needless to say, like 99.975% of the history of life on Earth, this all occurred 280 million years ago, during that long pre-“Creation Week” period before the creationist god supposedly decided to create his small flat planet with a dome over it and call it perfect.

The nonsensical idea that there were no deaths before “The Fall” has always defied logic because all living things require a supply of energy in the form of food. Even if that food is plants, plants must die in the process. But then the Bible’s mythologies were written by people who confused “living” with “breathing”, so assumed plants were not living. Presumably, Bible literalists today believe the same biologically nonsensical idea.

The evidence for the earliest large land predators comes from three palaeontologists led by Professor Robert R. Reisz of the Department of Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports. The group studied tooth marks on the fossilised skeletons of three young herbivores from the Permian of Texas. Two hundred and eighty million years ago was relatively soon after the first terrestrial tetrapods had crawled out of the sea and evolved into amphibians and the earliest proto-reptiles. The evolution of predation would have been a major driver of evolution due to the resulting arms races in which predators became more efficient hunters and prey became better at avoiding being eaten—a process that hardly fits the description “intelligent design”.

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

Xiphodracon goldencapensis

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

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 - Nosey Secrets of Triceratops Reveal Advanced Evolution - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Triceratops skull. Seishiro Tada (left) standing next to an awe-inspiring Triceratops skull, with its enormous nasal cavity visible at the front.

©2026 Tada CC-BY-ND

Why Triceratops has such a big nose | The University of Tokyo

Once upon a time, in that ancient world during the 99.975% of Earth’s history that elapsed before creationism’s small god supposedly conceived the idea of creating a small flat plane with a dome over it in the Middle East, there lived a dinosaur that had evolved a horned head and a wide protective frill to shield its vulnerable neck from the jaws of the large predators that ruled the land some 100 million years ago. Carrying those horns and that protective neck shield required a large head — and a large head is difficult to keep cool.

The solution, according to researcher Seishiro Tada of the University of Tokyo Museum, was a large nasal cavity containing turbinate bones to mix incoming air, together with a plentiful blood supply to dissipate excess heat. Tada and colleagues from various Japanese research institutions have recently published their findings in The Anatomical Record.

This is not a fairy story, but what palaeontology is revealing.

From an evolutionary perspective, this research shows that Triceratops was the product of a long evolutionary process in which predation drove the development of large defensive structures, which in turn created new physiological challenges — in this case, the risk of overheating. Those challenges then drove further evolutionary adaptations. In other words, the solution to one problem generated another problem to be solved, all as part of a predator–prey arms race. This dynamic makes no sense as the work of an intelligent designer, but it is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - A Dinosaur With Spikes - 125 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Haolong dongi in a Cretaceous forest setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Artistic reconstruction of a juvenile Haolong dongi from the Early Cretaceous of China (125 million years ago).

© Fabio Manucci.

A dinosaur with spikes exhibiting unprecedented properties discovered in China | CNRS

Almost eight weeks into the New Year and not a single scientific paper has emerged in support of creationism—or its pseudo-scientific variant, Intelligent Design. Not even a speculative hint of the long-predicted collapse of ‘Darwinism’, nor any sign that Intelligent Design is making inroads into biomedical science. Instead, the steady flow of research continues to do precisely the opposite: quietly and methodically reinforcing evolutionary biology as the indispensable framework through which palaeontology, cell biology, virology and the rest of modern life sciences make coherent, testable sense of the evidence.

Today brings yet another example. An international team led by researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), working at the Université de Rennes, has identified a new species of iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in what is now China around 125 million years ago. Their paper, recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reports that this species was probably covered in hollow spikes, somewhat reminiscent of porcupine quills. The team have named the new species Haolong dongi in honour of Dong Zhiming, a pioneer of Chinese palaeontology.

Using X-ray scans and high-resolution histological sections, the researchers were able to identify preserved skin structures, revealing hollow cutaneous spikes over much of the animal’s body. Although herbivorous, this dinosaur lived in an environment where predation pressure from small carnivores would have been significant, and the spikes likely provided a degree of protection comparable to that of modern porcupines. The structures may also have played roles in thermoregulation and/or sensory perception.

Refuting Creationism - Life In A New Zealand Cave - 1 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Prehistoric New Zealand Cave

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

AI generated image of the NZ cave

P Scofield, Canterbury Museum.

1m-year-old 'lost world' discovered – News

About a million years before creationism’s putative designer supposedly fashioned a small flat world beneath a solid dome — the imagined cosmos of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East who authored the Bible’s creation myths — ancient frogs and birds, the ancestors of today’s New Zealand species, lived and died and became fossilised deep in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island.

Of course, confined as they were to within a few days’ walk of the Canaanite hills, the authors of those myths could have had no inkling of people and places in far-flung regions of a spherical planet. Their tales were based entirely on what they imagined to be the whole universe, and contain nothing that existed beyond their narrow horizons.

How these New Zealand fossils were unearthed, and what they can tell us about Aotearoa’s deep past, is the subject of a paper just published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, by a research group led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

It is, of course, a story vastly different from Biblical mythology — the evidence for which stubbornly refuses to manifest itself, and instead consistently refutes it, revealing it to be the product of parochial ignorance and an attempt to force-fit what little was known into prevailing cultural assumptions: what Christopher Hitchens aptly called “the fearful infancy of our species”.

The findings show that around 33–50% of species went extinct about one million years before humans first arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand). The cause appears to have been a combination of rapid climate change and catastrophic volcanic activity. The discovery helps fill a fifteen-million-year gap in our knowledge of Aotearoa’s history.

Excavations at St Bathans in Central Otago have allowed palaeontologists and geologists to reconstruct the period between 20 and 16 million years ago, but until now there has been very little information about the long stretch between then and one million years ago.

Among the discoveries was a new species of parrot, Strigops insulaborealis, an ancient relative of the flightless kākāpō, but one that could probably fly; an extinct ancestor of the modern takahē; and an extinct species of pigeon closely related to Australian bronzewing pigeons.

To forestall the traditional creationist attempt to discredit both the discovery and the scientists who made it — by claiming the dating methods are flawed or even fraudulent — the fossils can be dated accurately because they lie between two layers of volcanic ash: one deposited around 1.55 million years ago, and another about one million years ago. Volcanic ash can be dated with a high degree of confidence using Uranium–Lead (U–Pb) dating of zircon crystals.

Creationism Refuted - A Football-sized Vegetarian - From 307 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A Shoreline scene in the Carboniferous

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern.

Illustration by Hannah Fredd.

Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat its veggies - Field Museum

We have another example today of how the evidence written into the fossil record — which creationists insist either does not exist, or is at best a lie forged to deceive us — stubbornly refuses to conform to creationist requirements. Instead, it continues to tell the only story it can: of life evolving slowly over deep time on a planet that is billions of years old.

The latest example comes from a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the Smithsonian Museum. The study was co-led by Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum.

The paper presents evidence of the earliest known herbivorous vertebrate — dating to some 307 million years before creationists believe the Earth was created. Once again, this highlights the fundamental problem creationists face when they begin with a dogmatic belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old because a handful of Bronze Age pastoralists said so. Having declared in advance that there has been no significant evolution, only minor variation within “kinds”, they are then forced to twist and contort the real-world evidence in a futile attempt to shoehorn it into their absurdly compressed timescale.

The animal, named Tyrannoroter heberti by the researchers, evolved over the tens of millions of years since the first vertebrates transitioned from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial tetrapods around 375 million years ago — perhaps to escape aquatic predators, or to exploit the invertebrate prey that had already colonised the land. Plants, meanwhile, which had begun spreading onto land some 475 million years ago, had also been evolving, and by this time were well established as ferns, horsetails, and other tough early vegetation.

Tyrannoroter heberti, known so far from a single skull, was probably among the largest terrestrial animals alive at the time, reaching around a foot in length — roughly the size of an American football — based on the proportions of close relatives. The fossil was recovered from shoreline cliffs in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.

It is thought to represent a stem amniote: part of the lineage of vertebrates that evolved the ability to lay eggs away from water, unlike amphibians which must still return to water to reproduce. This group ultimately gave rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals — in other words, to almost the entire later terrestrial vertebrate world, including ourselves.

Refuting Creationism - Blood Tests On Ancient Fossils - And What They Can Tell Us

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Life in fossil bones: what we can learn from tiny traces of ancient blood chemicals

A paper recently published in Nature details the application of a new field known as palaeometabolomics to reconstruct ancient African environments and track how they changed over time.

Modern medicine can learn a great deal about our health and lifestyle from a blood test, because blood contains traces of metabolites derived from the food we eat, as well as indicators of liver and kidney function and how effectively metabolic waste is disposed of.

But what if we could perform blood tests on archaic animals and human ancestors? Over time, this could tell us not only what they ate, but how their diets changed, which in turn reveals changes in rainfall, temperature, vegetation cover — forest versus savannah — and the species that were hunted and consumed.

Refuting Creationism - How The Transitional Ediacaran Biota Slowly Evolved Into The Cambrian Biota

Ediacaran fossils

How Did These Strange, Ancient Organisms Turn into Such Remarkable Fossils? | GSA News Release 26-01

A recent paper published in the journal Geology by three geologists from Yale, led by Dr Lidya G. Tarhan, explains how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in such exquisite detail, while the transition to the (mostly) soft-bodied Cambrian biota and the Cambrian diversification are so poorly represented in the fossil record. It turns out that this was due to the particular chemistry of Ediacaran seawater, which enabled dead organisms to be coated and encased in a fine layer of clay that protected and preserved their structure. As ocean chemistry changed, this fortuitous process became progressively less effective.

Creationists love few things more than a gap in scientific knowledge as somewhere to position their favourite god, presumably having been fooled into believing a false dichotomy — either science can currently explain it or God did it — or at least expecting their target audience to be fooled by it. Sadly for creationists, this has created an ever-decreasing number of places in which to force-fit their ever-shrinking little god, as science, with relentless, unstoppable efficiency, fills one gap after another.

One such gap which creationists regularly trot out and misrepresent is the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”, which they have been fooled into believing was a sudden event occurring at an instant in time, before which there were no multicellular organisms and after which a myriad diverse body plans all appeared overnight without ancestry.

This conveniently ignores two important facts: the pre-existing Ediacaran biota, and the fact that the Ediacaran biota transitioned into the Cambrian biota over a period of some 30 million years.

In reality, of course, there is no such gap — it exists only in the minds of those ignorant enough to believe the misrepresentation. However, there is, or rather was, a gap, and one which creationists would probably prefer not to think about. It was the lack of a good explanation for how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in the fossil record in such exquisite detail, while the Cambrian “explosion” only looks like a sudden event because so few of the (soft-bodied) transitional forms were preserved.

Certainly, once it began, the Cambrian was a period of exponential diversification during which hard body parts evolved as defensive structures such as shells, spines, and hard exoskeletons; offensive structures such as jaws; and organs of mobility such as limbs and fins. Also evolving were sense organs and nervous systems. It would have been astonishing almost beyond credibility if every step of a rapid diversification of initially soft-bodied organisms had contrived to leave a fossil record of every stage, so all we really have is an infrequent series of snapshots at discrete locations, each capturing a brief moment in a global evolutionary history lasting about 55 million years.

Creationism Refuted - How The Mammalian Ear Evolved - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammals | University of Chicago News

A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) reports the discovery that an ancestor of mammals, a cynodont called Thrinaxodon liorhinus, had ear structures derived from redundant jaw bones that probably gave it an acute sense of hearing some 250 million years ago — around 50 million years earlier than previously believed. As nocturnal animals, a well-developed sense of hearing would have been hugely advantageous.

The research, by palaeontologists from the University of Chicago, used CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.

Transitional fossils such as this are a major source of embarrassment to creationists because their Bronze Age mythology insists that all species were created fully formed, without ancestry, so there should never be any examples of species evolving or of existing structures being exapted over time for new functions.

Sadly for creationists, the fossil evidence paints an entirely different picture. It is a record of everything creationism predicts should not be there and everything evolution predicts will be. To most normal people, that sort of evidence should strongly suggest that creationism is wrong and that the Theory of Evolution is right.

It is rather like someone who does not believe in gravity stating that if you throw a stone into the air it will stay there and never fall back to Earth. A simple demonstration will establish the falsehood of that claim, just as the fossil record establishes the falsehood of creationist claims.