Refuting Creationism - A Newly-Identified Dinosaur From About 220 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Newtonsaurus cambrensis in its natural setting

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

September: Newtonsaurus identification | News and features | University of Bristol

A newly-identified dinosaur from the Late Triassic of Wales has turned out to be hiding in plain sight. The fossil, discovered in 1899 and displayed for years in the National Museum of Wales, has only now been correctly recognised thanks to modern imaging technology unavailable to earlier researchers.

Originally described by Edwin Tully Newton in 1899 as Zanclodon cambrensis, the specimen has now been reclassified by a team of palaeontologists led by Owain Evans of Bristol University. Since the name Zanclodon is no longer used for early reptiles, the team have given it a new name: Newtonsaurus.

As always, discoveries like this present a problem for creationists. Fossils of species that lived tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago sit uneasily with their narrative that all life was magically created just a few thousand years ago. To preserve that story, they are forced into feats of mental gymnastics — whether by bearing false witness against scientists, rejecting well-established dating techniques, or simply dismissing the evidence outright as “wrong.”

The rocks, however, are not so easily ignored. Unlike ancient manuscripts, said to have been dictated by a god to prophets and accepted only on faith, the fossil record is physical, testable, and open to constant re-examination. Evidence can be checked, rechecked, and reassessed as methods improve — something faith alone cannot provide.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Made - No God-Magic Needed

High-energy Venus Impacts

An SwRI-led team compared the early impact history of Venus and Earth, determining that Venus experienced higher-energy impacts that created a superheated core. Models show these conditions could create Venus’ extended volcanism and younger surface.

Evolution of Terrestrial Planets
A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For instance, the Earth experienced transient subduction, when one tectonic plate slides beneath another. Because Venus’ surface is covered by a single plate, a high-velocity impact led to a superheated core and long-lived volcanism. On Mars, a large, low-velocity impact facilitated variations in its hemispheres. Impacts also modify the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in profound ways, including eliminating or supplementing existing gases.

SwRI-led paper summarizes notable progress in understanding the evolution of the terrestrial planets | Southwest Research Institute

Creationist myths describe Earth as a flat world under a dome at the centre of the Universe, made just a few thousand years ago. The real story is far more extraordinary: a fragile chain of chance events and natural forces that made life possible on this small rocky planet.

Earth orbits an ordinary star on the edge of the Milky Way, one of billions in one of trillions of galaxies. That it exists at all is down to gravity, physics, and luck. Out of this came a beautiful world teeming with life—including one species able to marvel at the Universe and ask how it all began, and in it's fearful, ignorant infancy, make up the myths to explain it that now pass for science in some scientifically backward cultures.

One early collision with a smaller planetoid gave us the Moon, tides, and seasons; this or a later impact may, according to this study, be responsible for tectonic plates, giving us a forever changing, dynamic planet, driving evolutionary divergence. While not required for life to appear, these events shaped the planet into the diverse, life-rich world we know today.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaur Eggs From 85 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Egg clutch sampled for chronological studies.

Credit Dr. Bi Zhao

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Dinosaur egg fossil sampled for geochronology.

Credit: Dr Bi Zhao

Newly dated 85-million-year-old dino eggs could improve understanding of Cretaceous climate

The dating of a clutch of fossil dinosaur eggs will leave creationists scrambling for excuses to dismiss the evidence and cling to the childish notion that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, created ex nihilo by magic, with all extant and extinct species brought into existence without ancestors just a few days later. In other words, this discovery is yet another small addition to the mountain of evidence showing that the biblical creation story was the work of ignorant Bronze Age people trying to make sense of the world around them, not the word of an omniscient creator god who would have known better.

An added problem for creationists is that the research team used a new method of dating the eggs based on measuring when the eggshell itself formed, rather than relying solely on dating the rock in which the eggs were embedded. The difficulty with the latter approach is that, while it gives the age of the surrounding rock, the mineral grains in that rock may predate the eggs and could have been transported there by water or wind.

The new technique is conceptually similar to the uranium–lead (U–Pb) method used to date zircon crystals in volcanic tuff. Tiny amounts of uranium, which readily substitute into the crystal lattice, are incorporated when the zircon forms, but lead is excluded. Over time, uranium isotopes decay into stable isotopes of lead. Thus, any lead present within a zircon crystal must have come from radioactive decay, and by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes, scientists can calculate the crystal’s age with high precision.

A very similar process occurs in the carbonate of dinosaur eggshells: uranium is incorporated during formation, but lead is excluded. Measuring uranium–lead isotope ratios in the shell carbonate therefore provides a direct and highly accurate age for the eggs themselves, leaving little room for error.

Creationism Refuted - Filling The Gaps That Ignorant Creationists Never Knew Existed

Artistic reconstruction of Bolg amondol, depicted raiding an oviraptorosaur dinosaur nest amidst the lush Kaiparowits Formation habitat.

Art by Cullen Townsend.

A Monster “Goblin” at the Feet of Dinosaurs | Natural History Museum

View of the Kaiparowits Formation from Death Ridge in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Figure 4. Reconstruction of UMNH VP 16266 (holotype, Bolg amondol gen. et sp. nov.). Gold: preserved skeletal elements. Grey: morphological hypotheses of reconstructed elements based on the morphology of preserved skeletal elements. Black: missing skeletal elements, based on publicly available rendered CT scans on morphosource.org of specimen UF:Herp:153328, Heloderma horridum.

Woolley C. Henrik, et al. (2025)

There was a gaping hole in our knowledge of evolution which, had creationists been aware of it, we would never have heard the end of. They would have claimed that their gap-shaped god fitted it perfectly, like a puddle in its hollow. Of course, it was no secret. Biologists—especially those studying the evolution of lizards—knew about it well enough. No one was hiding it from creationists. Their blissful ignorance was simply the result of their fear of engaging with real biology.

We knew that today’s large-bodied lizards must share common ancestors, but the gap lay in the fossil evidence to support that view—what creationists dismissively call “conjecture” or claims made without evidence. Yet the Theory of Evolution always predicted that such ancestral and transitional forms must have existed.

Creationists, however, have missed that particular boat because the gap has now been filled. The prediction of evolutionary theory has, once again, been vindicated.

The gap-filling discovery was made by Dr Hank Woolley of the Dinosaur Institute while examining a jar of bones at the Natural History Museum of Utah, simply labelled “lizard bones.” Dr Woolley identified them as belonging to the Monstersauria—a group of lizards with a 100-million-year history, but until now an incomplete fossil record. A modern member of this group is the Gila Monster, one of only two venomous lizards alive today. The fossil, belonging to a large-bodied lizard which Dr Woolley has named Bolg amondol after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was found in the Kaiparowits Formation of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Utah—a palaeontological treasure trove and one of North America’s richest dinosaur-dominated records. Alongside dozens of new species, the site offers a vital window into the deep past. The age of this fossil places it squarely in the age of the dinosaurs, a crucial factor in lizard evolution.

Incidentally, the picture above shows the Kaiparowits Formation. Perhaps a creationist would like to explain how those vast sedimentary strata could have been deposited in a single global flood.

Refuting Creationism - Oceanic Oxygenation Spured Rappid Evolution - 390 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s rendering of a prehistoric jawed fish from the Late Devonian called Dunkleosteus. These sorts of large, active vertebrates evolved shortly after the deep ocean became well-oxygenated.

© 2008 Nobu Tamura/CC-BY-SA.

How oxygen made the deep ocean home to animals, spurring rapid evolution | UW News

Another wave of reality breaks over the impervious rocks of creationist dogma, in the form of news that an international team of researchers led by the University of Washington has shown a correlation between the rapid radiation of marine vertebrates and the evolution of plants on land. As trees and other vascular plants spread, more atmospheric carbon became locked into their woody stems, reducing carbon dioxide levels. At the same time, increased photosynthesis raised atmospheric oxygen levels, which in turn oxygenated the oceans, making oxygen available in depths that had previously been anoxic.

Creationists will, of course, need to ignore the fact that this finding flatly contradicts their claims that evolution only occurs within “kinds” and that all diversification happened in a brief burst of warp-speed evolution following a genocidal global flood some 4,000 years ago. The timeline alone is utterly inconsistent with their favourite creationist fairy tale.

Scientists once believed this major oxygenation event had occurred about 500 million years ago, but the new research shows that episode was short-lived. A more significant oxygenation occurred around 390 million years ago. Initially, oxygenation would have taken place in shallow coastal regions where vertebrates first evolved. As oxygen penetrated deeper into the oceans, vertebrates followed into the newly opened niches, leading to a rapid proliferation of jawed vertebrate species — the ancestors from which terrestrial tetrapods later evolved.

The team reached their conclusions after measuring selenium isotopes in 97 sedimentary rock samples from five continents, dated between 252 and 541 million years ago. These rocks had been deposited near the edges of continental shelves, where shallow seas transition into the deep ocean. Selenium occurs naturally in several isotopic forms, and the ratios in which they were deposited depend on the level of oxygen dissolved in seawater. These isotopic signatures thus provide an indirect measure of oxygenation levels at the time the rocks were laid down.

Refuting Creationism Again - Now A 500-Million-Year-Old Fossil Worm From Greenland

Reconstruction of Nektognathus, swimming in the Cambrian Sea

Image credit: Bob Nicholls

The holotype specimen of Nektognathus from Sirius Passet

Image credit: Tae Yoon Park

2025: Ancient squid-like creatures are not squid after all, study finds | School of Biological Sciences | University of Bristol

The bad day for those creationists who haven't yet closed their minds to contrary information continues. Close on the news of a 220-million-year-old fossil ichthyosaur from Japan comes the discovery of a 500-million-year-old fossil worm from Greenland.

The identification of this Cambrian fossil, Nectocaris, as an ancestor of arrow worms rather than an early squid, as once thought, is a fine example of something creationists pretend to find incomprehensible: scientists changing their minds when new evidence demands it. Wedded to simple certainties, right or wrong, creationists insist that science must be either wholly right or wholly wrong. If a conclusion is shown to be mistaken, they assume the entire scientific enterprise collapses into a cloud of vacuous uncertainty. In their black-and-white world of false dichotomies, that somehow means their evidence-free superstition wins by default.

About 15 years ago, a study of fossils from the Burgess Shale concluded that Nectocaris was a cephalopod mollusc. But that classification posed problems since what could be discerned of its anatomy did not match that of cephalopods. That difficulty has now been resolved by a detailed examination of the ventral ganglion – part of the nervous system – which is revealed to consist of paired structures consistent with being ancestral to arrow worms.

This breakthrough was made possible by the exceptional preservation of fossils at Sirius Passet in northern Greenland, a remarkable Cambrian fossil site.

Refuting Creationism - Earliest Known Hominins In Europe - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A researcher holds a stone tool in Korolevo.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

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Press release | The First Humans Came to Europe 1.4 Million Years Ago - ARUP

A map showing the migration of hominins through Europe.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

This news release slipped beneath my radar back in March 2024, but as it’s now being discussed on social media, I thought I’d take a look and track down the original press release and the publication in Nature.

The news came from the Czech Institute of Archaeology: research by an international team led by Roman Garba, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, has uncovered the earliest evidence of hominins in Europe at a site in Ukraine.

This is, like most discoveries in biology, archaeology, and geology, compelling evidence that the Bible’s account of creation is not only wrong, but so far removed from reality that it can’t even be rescued as metaphor or allegory. Increasingly large portions of the Bible now have to be explained away in this manner as mainstream Christianity retreats from the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and the idea of a creator god. What’s left is a dwindling rump of die-hard creationists, clinging desperately to the wreckage of their beliefs as the tsunami of evidence sweeps them further into irrelevance.

The discovery was made at Korolevo, Ukraine, and consisted of stone tools—sadly, no bones were found. If confirmed, this pushes back the timeline of hominin migration into Eurasia by 200,000 to 300,000 years from the previous earliest known date at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. The scale of denialism required to dismiss this discovery can be measured in the response of one such creationist on Facebook:

since the earth is less then [sic] 6,000 years old where was this skeliton [sic – it’s actually a stone tool] for the remiander [sic] of that time seeing there was no universe?

Refuting Creationism - The Grand Canyon Is a Treasure Trove Of Cambrian Fossils - From 500 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

View of the Grand Canyon from the Colorado River.

Jason Muhlbauer

Grand Canyon was a ‘Goldilocks zone’ for the evolution of early animals

One of the things about American creationism that many people in the rest of the world find endearing—if not more than a little irritating—is the ignorant parochialism that underpins so much of it. For example, it is part of the creationist narrative that the Grand Canyon is “proof” of the biblical flood because, so they assert, the layers were laid down during the flood and the canyon was then gouged out by the floodwaters running away. This also plays neatly into the biblical flat Earth idea, because they assume the floodwaters went somewhere—presumably over the edge—having been magically piled up for the best part of a year until the magic was removed.

And of course, it all happened in America, where the important things always happen and where anything that happens is important—when Jesus returns, it will be to America; America is the place God is preparing for Jesus’s return, and so on.

So the recent open-access paper in Science Advances by an international team of palaeontologists led by scientists from Cambridge University, UK, reporting that the Grand Canyon is a rich source of fossils from the Cambrian biota, will no doubt come as a shock to American creationists.

Creationism in Crisis - Transitional Penguin Fossils From New Zealand - 60 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artistic representation of a North Canterbury beach some 62 millions years ago.

Canterbury Museum and Tom Simpson, CC BY-SA

Dagger beaks and strong wings: new fossils rewrite the penguin story and affirm NZ as a cradle of their evolution.

One of the most glaring flaws in creationist reasoning — among the many — is its desperate reliance on gaps in knowledge as hiding places for their putative god. It’s a strategy that ensures their god grows ever smaller and often vanishes entirely as science steadily closes those gaps. This “god of the gaps” approach is ultimately doomed—either to complete collapse or to a never-ending scramble for new gaps, real or imagined, in the forlorn hope that this time, unlike every other, the gap will contain the one thing they crave: a god that cannot be explained away.

One such gap — of which creationists so far seem blissfully unaware, or we would never hear the end of it — is the evolutionary transition between the flying ancestors of penguins and the modern, flightless penguins whose skeletons have adapted from an aerial to a marine existence. This transformation involved all the changes needed to turn wings into powerful flippers for ‘flying’ underwater, a more upright gait, and feathers adapted for life in the water and for the cold of the Antarctic environment where most species now live.

That gap has just been substantially filled by the discovery of a large collection of ancient penguin fossils in the Waipara Greensand Formation in New Zealand, north of Canterbury. This formation spans roughly 62.5 to 58 million years ago—a period of some 4.5 million years, beginning only a few million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. With every such discovery, the supposed “mystery” shrinks a little more—and the god wedged into it fades further into irrelevance. How these fossils fill the gap in our knowledge of penguin evolution is the subject of an article in The Conversation by two palaeontologists from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand: Vanesa De Pietri, Senior Research Fellow in Palaeontology, and Paul Scofield, Adjunct Professor in Palaeontology. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, some background information on the Waipara Greensand Formation:

Creationism Refuted - The Subterranean Microbes That Make Creationists Sick

Karen Lloyd

Buried Alive: The Secret Life of Deep Earth Microbes

What if we could peer back through deep time and see what single-celled organisms looked like—not just thousands, but hundreds of millions of years ago—and compare them to their living descendants? It would be a revelation for science… and a nightmare for creationists.

That’s precisely what geobiologist Karen Lloyd and her team at the University of Southern California (USC) are uncovering. They study microorganisms that have made an incredible journey: born in the depths of the ocean, slowly buried under a relentless rain of sediment, and then carried by plate tectonics into the deep Earth, where subduction dragged them beneath continental crust. There, cut off from oxygen and sunlight, they survived for millions of years in a slow-motion existence, drawing nutrients from the surrounding rock. Their metabolic rates became so low they could no longer replicate, yet they endured by “breathing”—in the biochemical sense—through redox reactions, extracting energy from electrons provided by whatever electron donors the rocks could supply. Some have even evolved the ability to “breathe” carbon dioxide, something unknown among terrestrial life.

These organisms’ existence is a direct challenge to creationist dogma—not only because they have persisted for timescales far beyond the Bible’s allowance, but because they reveal how even apparently simple single-celled organisms can diverge and adapt over geological epochs. Environmental pressures have driven them into extraordinary evolutionary niches, each defined by what they have learned to “breathe.” Moreover, they exist in environments in which life as we know it couldn't survive, yet creationists insist that Earth was intelligently created, perfect for life, which begs the question, which life? The life that breathes using arsenic, lives for millions of years deep underground with almost no metabolic activity and survive in the heat and acidity of volcanic hot springs, or life the breathes oxygen and needs a regular supply of water and a narrow range of ambient temperatures in which to survive without special equipment?

Creationism In Crisis - A 145-Million-Year-Old Fossil Early Mammal From Dorset, England

Imaginative reconstruction of Novaculadon mirabilis. Likely this animal would have been a little larger than a mouse.

Picture credit: Hamzah Imran.

(L-R) Dr Roy Smith and University of Portsmouth student Ben Weston by the flint bed in Durlston Bay near Swanage, which is the layer of rock which the mammal fossil came out of.

Credit: Ben Weston.

New species of tiny Cretaceous mammal discovered by University of Portsmouth student | University of Portsmouth

When someone grows up being threatened with divine punishment for merely entertaining doubts about the literal truth of the Bible, it's hardly surprising that real-world evidence struggles to break through the psychological defences they've built to protect themselves. This phenomenon is what atheist author and philosopher, Professor Peter Boghossian refers to as doxastic closure — a mental state in which contrary ideas are shut out before they can even be considered.

Former young-Earth creationist and now science advocate and geologist Glenn Morton once described it as like having a “gatekeeper demon” perched on the edge of your consciousness—filtering out any facts or logical arguments that challenge creationist beliefs, while admitting only those misrepresentations of science that appear to support them.

In this mindset, inconvenient realities — such as the discovery of a 145-million-year-old fossil of an early mammal — are unlikely to dent the conviction that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old, and that all animals were created in a single supernatural event. In this view, evolution is simply an illusion, no matter how well the evidence supports it.

Even so, for any creationist with the courage and intellectual honesty to read this far, the story of that inconvenient little fossil is well worth exploring. It was discovered by a palaeontology student from the University of Portsmouth, along the Dorset coast of England, and is the subject of a recent paper in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.

This find marks the first discovery of a multituberculate jaw at Swanage since Victorian times. Its distinct size and shape confirmed it as a completely new species.

Refuting Creationism - The Mass Extinction 252 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Dr Zhen Xu on fieldwork in China.

Image credit: Zhen Xu

Pre-extinction tropical rainforest seed fern, Gigantopteris, (giant leaves)

Dr Zhen Xu.

New fossils reveal climate tipping point in most famous mass extinction | University of Leeds

Creationists claim that Earth is only a few thousand years old and that it was created perfectly and finely tuned for life—brought into existence without ancestors, from nothing, by means of supernatural command. Their evidence for this extraordinary claim rests on the beliefs of Bronze Age pastoralists who imagined Earth as small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. These ancient myths were eventually written down, bound up in a book later declared by people with a vested interest, to be divinely inspired and historically accurate.

Science, by contrast, presents a very different picture. Far from being a perfect and finely tuned haven for life, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile planet. Life persists here not because conditions are universally benign, but because a small number of organisms have evolved to thrive within narrow environmental niches. Throughout Earth’s long history, global conditions have periodically tipped into extremes so severe that they triggered mass extinction events. Unlike creationist claims, these conclusions are supported by tangible, testable evidence.

One such event—known as the Great Dying—occurred around 252 million years ago, relatively recent in the planet’s \~4.5 billion-year history. This catastrophe, the most severe extinction event known, was likely triggered by intense volcanic activity that caused a rapid and sustained rise in global temperatures. The resulting climate shift led to the collapse of tropical forests, which in turn reduced the planet’s capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon, driving further warming. This cascade of ecological breakdown led to the loss of most marine species and widespread collapse of terrestrial ecosystems.

The outcome was a planetary heatwave that lasted for approximately five million years.

New evidence for the role of rainforest collapse in both the onset and the recovery from the Great Dying has been presented by an international team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Leeds and the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper published in Nature Communications and summarised in a news release from the University of Leeds.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence of Humans In America 13,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, reported in 2021, show that human activity occurred in the Americas as long as 23,000 years ago – about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A new U of A study supports the 2021 findings.

Courtesy of David Bustos/
White Sands National Park

Earliest evidence of humans in the Americas confirmed in new U of A study | University of Arizona News

Fig. 3. Alkali Flat east escarpment.
(A) WHSA Locality 2 (view east) (Fig. 2B) with exposure of alluvial beds and palustrine beds along the escarpment. Stratum 1 is exposed in the foreground (comprising the eastern margin of Alkali Flat), but in this photo, it is dried out and covered with a thin sheet of eolian gypsum sand. The finely bedded sands and muds of Stratum 2A comprise the low escarpment in the middle ground, expressed by the thin, horizontal ledges formed by differential weathering of the stream beds. The trench exposing human tracks in Stratum 2A is at the left.

Vance T. Holliday et al.(2025)

Fig. 1. Field area setting.
The northern Tularosa Basin showing the area of the White Sands (“Gypsum Sand Dunes”), the Alkali Fat deflation basin, modern Lake Lucero, and present-day Lost River, which drains southwest across the distal piedmont until it is buried by the gypsum dunes (see also fig. S4). The 1204-m contour line approximates the proposed extent of paleolake Otero (15). It was likely more extensive given the >4 m of lake beds at “G.” The two field areas (red dots) are as follows: “G” is the area of Gypsum Overlook, the Central study area, and WHSA Locality 2; “Loc 1” is a stratigraphic section along the west margin of Alkali Flat. The brown pattern at G is the area of exposures of deposits linked to paleolake Otero and overlain by truncated Holocene dunes (31). The inset shows the location of the White Sands and the Tularosa Basin within New Mexico [based on figure 1 in (31)].

Image credit: X. Gong and A. Cowart, University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab.
Vance T. Holliday et al.(2025)

The Bronze Age Middle Eastern authors of the Bible clearly knew little of the world beyond a few days' walk from their homes in the Canaanite Hills. The world they described — and the stories they invented to fill the vast gaps in their knowledge — contained nothing unfamiliar to them. They had no way of knowing the true age of the Earth or the Universe, which they imagined to be fixed and immobile. They knew nothing of the history of living or extinct species, nor of the compelling evidence for common ancestry stretching back hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions, of years. And they were entirely unaware of the existence of other peoples living in distant lands, across vast oceans on other continents.

It should come as no surprise, then, that they got so much wrong, and that their writings omitted nearly everything science has since revealed about human origins. We now know that Homo sapiens diversified from archaic ancestors in Africa and gradually spread across the globe—migrating over land bridges now submerged by rising sea levels and eventually reaching the Americas.

Almost all of this is well-established in modern science, with the only significant uncertainty remaining around the precise timing of the first human colonisation of the Americas from Siberia. Bible literalists attempt to sidestep this discrepancy between the scientific evidence and the biblical narrative by postulating, without any supporting evidence, that the Bible was authored by an omniscient creator god. They argue that any contradiction with scientific findings must be due to mistaken interpretation, not error in the Bible. In essence, their reasoning runs: “The Bible was written by an all-knowing god because the Bible says so—therefore, any conflicting evidence must be wrong.” Instead of critically examining the claims of Bronze Age hill farmers, they demand that science must bend to fit ancient, unsubstantiated assertions.

One striking example of the scientific evidence at odds with biblical literalism is the recent confirmation that human footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, are 23,000 years old—some 13,000 years older than biblical literalists believe the Earth itself to be.

These footprints were discovered in 2021 and initially dated to 23,000 years ago — 10,000 years earlier than the previously accepted earliest human presence in the Americas. While this early date was controversial, a team led by Professor Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences has now re-evaluated the evidence and confirmed the original finding.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in Science, with an explanation in an official University of Arizona news release.

Refuting Creationism - How Living Organism's Survived - 700 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Researchers Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato and Marc Schallenberg of the University of Otago measure the physicochemical conditions of a meltwater pond.

Credit: Roger Summons

Pustular microbial mat section such as could have existend in small melt-water ponds.

When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Only by systematically ignoring geological and archaeological evidence can creationists continue to delude themselves into believing that Earth is just a few thousand years old and was perfectly created by an anthropophilic god especially for humans – its supposed “special creation.”

The evidence, however, paints a radically different picture from that childish superstition. Not only was Earth clearly not perfectly created for humans, it wasn’t perfectly created for any life form. And it is far older than creationists assert. In truth, around 600 million years ago, Earth was such a hostile place for life that it was entirely covered in ice. The polar ice sheets had extended until they met at the equator. These “Snowball Earth” conditions led to a mass extinction so severe that it remains something of a mystery how any life survived – especially complex eukaryotic cells.

Now, a multinational team of researchers led by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found evidence that early life could have survived in small pools of surface meltwater. They reached this conclusion after studying similar meltwater pools on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica. What they found not only showed that single-celled eukaryotes can survive in such conditions, but also revealed that the population of prokaryotes varies according to local environmental conditions

These meltwater pools act as microcosms of diverse environments and demonstrate how local factors shape the distribution of different species – exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. Had the conditions been perfect as creationists insist, there could be no variation in the populations in these pools. Variation only arises because the species need to adapt to different conditions - something that would never be needed in perfectly designed conditions.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

Refuting CReationism - A Transitional Salmon Ancestor from 73 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Horseshoeichthys armaserratus from the Prince Creek Formation (PCF) and Dinosaur Park Formation compared.

See caption below

New ancient fish species earliest known salmon ancestor | UAF news and information

Cypriniform abdominal centrum from the Prince Creek Formation (A, UAMES 54154) compared with an extant cypriniform abdominal centrum (B, Catostomus Catostomus, TMP 1990.0007.303) in (from left to right): anterior, left lateral, posterior, dorsal and ventral view. Images in A are digital reconstructions from computed tomography scans; images in B are photographs of specimens dusted with ammonium chloride. Scale bars represent 1 mm.

Contrary to the childish fairy tales believed by creationists which tell tales of magic creation ex nihilo just a few thousand years ago, real grown-up science repeatedly shows that 99.9975% of Earth's history happened before then and living species are the result of an evolutionary process.

It’s no surprise then that this is just another such paper. It reports on the discovery of fossil ancestors of modern salmon which lived in Alaskan rivers, 70 million years ago, pushing back the earliest ancestral salmon so far discovered by 20 million years.

The discovery was made by palaeontologists from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks led by Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. They have just published their findings, open access, in the journal, Papers in Palaeontology. Their work is also explained in a University of Alaska, Fairbanks, news item:

Refuting Creationism - How Plate Tectonics Allowed The Interchange of Species, Including Human Ancestors, Between Africa and Asia

How Activity in Earth’s Mantle Led the Ancient Ancestors of Elephants, Giraffes, and Humans into Asia and Africa | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

An international team of geophysicists has uncovered compelling evidence that tectonic activity approximately 20 million years ago created a land bridge between Eurasia and Africa via the Arabian Peninsula. This geological event facilitated the migration of various animal species, including the ancestors of modern elephants, giraffes, and hominins, from Eurasia into Africa, which had been relatively isolated since the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

The formation of this land bridge resulted from the collision between the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates. This collision led to the uplift of the Arabian Peninsula and the closure of the Tethys Seaway, effectively splitting it into what are now the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas. The closure of the Tethys Seaway had significant climatic and ecological consequences, including alterations in ocean circulation patterns and the aridification of regions such as the Sahara Desert.

The newly formed land connection enabled a significant faunal exchange between Eurasia and Africa, known as the Proboscidean Datum Event. This event is marked by the migration of proboscideans (elephant ancestors) and other species into Africa, as well as the dispersal of African species into Eurasia . This biogeographical interchange had profound implications for the evolutionary trajectories of numerous species, including primates.

Refuting Creationism - How Sealife Recovered From Disaster - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Life Recovered Rapidly at Site of Dino-Killing Asteroid. A Hydrothermal System May Have Helped. | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

A figure showing a hypothesized semi-enclosed environment created by post-impact hydrothermal activity.

Credit: Sato et al.

A recurring point in this blog is that 99.9975% of Earth's history occurred before the time creationists claim the Earth was magically created out of nothing by an immaterial deity. It is strange how, despite the overwhelming evidence contradicting their viewpoint and a notable absence of credible supporting evidence, creationism endures as a belief system.

This requires either a profound lack of scientific knowledge and understanding, or extraordinary mental gymnastics, to cope with the cognitive dissonance and dismiss the abundant contrary evidence. Advocates of creationism frequently attempt to rationalise away this evidence, attributing it to errors, falsifications, or even alleging a global conspiracy within the scientific community.

Recently, another piece of evidence undermining creationist claims emerged with the publication of a study in Nature Communications. The paper documents how marine life rapidly recovered at the site of the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico, 66 million years before creationism's mythical 'Creation Week'.

This rapid recovery was facilitated by nutrient-rich waters resulting from hydrothermal activity triggered by the asteroid collision.

Creationists might not want to hear this because they have well-rehearsed excuses for dismissing radiometric dating, but the study depended on analyzing the ratios of stable osmium isotopes in sediments at the Chicxulub impact site. This analysis is not a form of radiometric dating; rather, it involves comparing the naturally occurring ratios of these isotopes from terrestrial and meteoritic sources to trace their origin. By correlating these isotopic variations with sediment depth, researchers have inferred the contribution of meteoritic material over time.

The timing of the Chicxulub impact has been corroborated through multiple independent methods, including high-precision uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating of zircon crystals. These zircons, found in impact-related deposits, provide robust age constraints that align with the established date of the event.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Formed

Impression of molten Earth at 300 million years old

AI-Generated image (Chat GPT4.5)

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Artistic view of Earth’s interior during mantle solidification in the first hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history. Gravitational segregation of dense, iron-rich magma (in orange) likely formed a basal magma ocean atop the core, that can explain the present-day structure of the lower mantle.

York U research sheds light on earliest days of Earth’s formation - News@York

According to creationist mythology, approximately 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, a supernatural entity conjured Earth into existence out of nothing. This planet, according to the myth, was initially a small, flat surface covered by a dome, centred around the vicinity of the Middle East.

In stark contrast to this mythological narrative, scientific evidence reveals a completely different history — one so profoundly distinct that any metaphorical interpretation of the myth quickly collapses under scrutiny. The Earth is neither flat nor limited to a small region around the ancient Canaanite hills; nor does it possess a dome overhead. No amount of linguistic gymnastics can transform that ancient depiction into anything remotely resembling Earth, although it may well have resembled the perception of Earth from the point of view of scientifically illiterate Bronze Age pastoralists who had never travelled more than a day or two's walk from their homeland and who though the sky was blue because of all the water above the transparent dome overhead.

As though any more refutation of the idea that the Bible contains an inerrant account of actual history, a recent study by a research team led by Assistant Professor Charles-Édouard Boukaré from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto, Canada, sheds new light on Earth's early geological development. Their research demonstrates how Earth gradually cooled over its first 100 million years, providing valuable insights into the planet’s current thermochemical internal structure.

Refuting Creationism - How The Ice Giants Created Complex Life In The Oceans

Glacial grooves stemming from the Wisconsin glaciation at Kelleys Island, Ohio

By Rmhermen, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Giant ice bulldozers: how ancient glaciers helped life evolve - News at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth, Australia

It's generally recognised that complex, multicellular life began in the oceans from colonies of single-celled organisms, but what isn't known is what environmental triggers promoted the evolution of this complexity.

Now researchers from Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, believe they have shown a correlation between this event, or series of events and the melting of vast ice sheets which covered Earth in a period known as snowball Earth. The trigger was not so much the melt-water and rise in sea levels as the minerals this melt-water brought with it. This sudden abundance of minerals was the result of the slow grinding of Earth's surface by giant glaciers as they gouged their way across the planet.

Creationism in Crisis - Early Hominins in Eurasia - >1.95 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cut marks on specimen from the Olteţ River Valley assemblage.

Curran, et al (2025)

Research team led by OHIO’s Sabrina Curran finds new evidence that pushes back the arrival of early hominins in Europe; discovery published in Nature Communications

Mandible with cut marks

Curran, et al (2025)

The problem with trying to maintain a belief that Earth is between 6 and 10 thousand years old is that 99.9975% of its history occurred earlier than 10,000 years ago, so almost everything archaeologists and geologists discover will prove to be from before you believe Earth existed, which, for normal people, might just be more than a hint that Earth is considerably older than you think.

Not so for creationists however, who consider their beliefs to be sacred and unfalsifiable, so the facts must be wrong.

The traditional way is to declare that radioactive decay rates on which geological formations and archaeological artifacts are dated must have changed, sometimes by many orders of magnitude.

These same creationists will also argue in a different context that the laws of nature which govern the structure and behaviour of the Universe and everything in it are so finely tuned to support life, that they must have been set by an intelligent designer.

However one of those 'fine-tuned' parameters is the weak nuclear force that binds the protons and neutrons in the atomic nuclei and for a radioactive atom to decay means that a quantum fluctuation in the energy levels in some of these particles must exceed the weak force binding them together, so the particle is ejected. But, for radioactive decay rates to be several orders of magnitude higher, the weak nuclear force would need to be much lower, below the point at which even stable atomic nuclei form at all. This means, when they believe the universe was created along with atoms, planets and life were created, there would have been no atoms to make it all from. Life would have been impossible.

An added problem is that scientists have shown that radioactive decay rates of different elements remain absolutely constant in a range of extreme temperature and pressure conditions, so there appears to be no support whatsoever for the declaration that decay rates have changed by several orders of magnitude so that an age of 10,000 year or less just happens to look like 300 million years or whatever finding is being waved aside.

If there were any merit in the creationist claim of a fine-tuned Universe, then it has been fine-tuned to make it look 14 billion years old, Earth to look nearly 4 billion years old and living organisms to have been on it for most of that time.

With that in mind then, researchers have just announced that they have found evidence of the presence of hominins in Eurasia 2 million years ago, which pushes back the earliest evidence of hominin presence outside Africa by at least 150,000 years to a time considerably earlier than Homo sapiens first appear in the fossil record - supporting the theory that the earliest migration into Eurasia was by an archaic hominin such as H. erectus.