Refuting Creationism - A Rhino From The Canadian Arctic - 23 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s recreation of Epiaceratherium itjilik, at its forested lake habitat, Devon Island, Early Miocene. The plants and animals shown are based on fossil finds at the site, including the transitional seal Puijila darwini.

© Julius Csotonyi

Fossil bones of Epiaceratherium itjilik. About 75% of the animal’s bones were recovered, including diagnostic bones such as the teeth, mandibles and parts of the cranium.

Pierre Poirier © Canadian Museum of Nature

A rhino from the Arctic - Canadian Museum of Nature

Another day, another incidental refutation of the childish biblical creation myth.

This one comes, as so many do, from scientists doing what scientists do best: uncovering the facts and following the evidence wherever it leads.

In this case, the evidence shows that a species of rhinoceros was living in the Canadian High Arctic about 23 million years ago. Even more significantly, the find suggests that rhinoceroses, once widespread across Eurasia and North America, crossed into North America far later than previously thought, by way of northern land connections that remained viable well into the Cenozoic.

Scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature have just announced the discovery of the species they named Epiaceratherium itjilik in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The discovery creates problems for creationism on several fronts. Most obviously, its age places it far outside the tiny timescale permitted by creationist mythology. It also demolishes the notion that modern animal distributions can be explained by descent from a single surviving pair a mere 4,000 years ago, because no such recent land bridge existed to carry rhinoceroses into North America. Instead, the fossil fits neatly into the well-established evolutionary history of rhinos, which stretches back roughly 40 million years, and into the geological evidence for changing sea levels and intermittent northern land connections between Eurasia and North America. These independent lines of evidence converge for the simple reason that they describe what really happened.

The fossilised remains, representing about three-quarters of a skeleton, were recovered from the rich fossil deposits of Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut. The animal is now the northernmost rhinoceros species yet known, and its excellent preservation has given palaeontologists an unusually complete picture of this unexpected Arctic browser.

Refuting Creationism - How Camellias Evolved As The Japanese Islands Formed

Camellia japonica

Camellia Rusticana

How Camellias evolved with the formation of the Japanese archipelago? | News | NIIGATA UNIVERSITY

It's a basic principle of evolution that environmental changes drive evolution by isolating populations which are then free to evolve on their own trajectory, and by creating new ecological niches into which species can diversify.

An almost perfect example of this in progress can be seen in the Camellia group of plants, of which one, tea, Camellia cinensis is perhaps the most important economically, But several others are also important cultivated garden plants with bright red, pink or white flowers.

Another phenomenon of evolution that this group of plants displays is that evolution is not a sudden event but a slow process over time, during which hybridization and gene flow between related species occurs until barriers to hybridization have evolved.

This tendency to form hybrids and the general similar morphologies has made accurate classification of the different species, and subspecies difficult and a matter of debate among taxonomists and botanists.

Now work by a team led by Dr. Harue Abe of Niigata University, Sado, Niiagata, Japan have shown how the evolution and distribution of this genus was strongly influenced by the formation of the Japanese archipelago.

Refuting Creationism - How Dynamic Geology Influenced Early Civilisation

The Great Ziggurat of Ur dedicated to the Moon god. Sumerians believed that the gods lived in the temple at the top of the ziggurats.

Photo credits: Reed Goodman,
Clemson University

Geography of Mesopotamian Plain (dashed black line) and its joint watershed (black line)

Giosan L, Goodman R (2025)

Urban civilization rose in Southern Mesopotamia on the back of tides – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have shown, in a paper just published in PLOS ONE, that the rise of Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia was strongly influenced by the dynamic interplay of tides, rivers, and sedimentation at the head of the Arabian Gulf. In doing so, they remind us just how parochial and derivative the culture that produced the origin myths in Genesis really was.

According to Genesis — which places the Middle East, and the Hebrews in particular, at the centre of everything — humans were created fully formed, without ancestry, in a ready-made Bronze Age civilisation.

Within just five generations of a supposed genocidal global flood that allegedly reset life on Earth, eight survivors are said to have produced a population large and skilled enough to embark on a massive civil engineering project: building a tower up to Heaven. In this worldview, Heaven lay just above the clouds over the Middle East, on a flat Earth watched over by a creator god who could apparently be taken by surprise.

Meanwhile, several other ancient civilisations were continuing uninterrupted, apparently unknown to the author of Genesis — despite the fact that some of the stories in Genesis are clearly derived from older Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths. Both the genocidal flood myth and the Tower of Babel narrative draw directly on Mesopotamian sources: the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the tower itself from the Great Ziggurat at Ur.

What the Genesis myths fail to acknowledge is the fundamental role of geological and environmental change in shaping human civilisation. The authors of these myths believed they lived in an unchanging world, created especially for them by a perfect god. There is no hint of plate tectonics shifting continents, no awareness that volcanic gases can alter climates, or that major rivers can change course or silt up. Yet such processes could and did disrupt the regular flooding on which early agriculture depended. Silting and delta formation could leave once-coastal communities stranded inland, while blocking the twice-daily tidal ebb and flow that once reached deep upriver.