Refuting Creationism - Wild Cattle Roamed The Grasslands Of Europe - 4 million Years Before Creation Week

Half-ton early Bovines roamed 4-million-year-old grasslands in Europe | EurekAlert!

Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?

This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.

They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.

One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.

The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.

This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.

Refuting Creationism - The Fossil Record Confirms Evolution - And Falsifies Creationism

Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.

Alex Boersma

Fossil Trove Expands Range of Squishy Early Animals - American Museum of Natural History

A paper published on 20 May 2026 in Science Advances by a team of palaeontologists led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, very neatly illustrates the difference between evolutionary biology and creationism. It reports the discovery of a rich new Ediacaran fossil site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories, containing fossils that appear earlier in the record, and in deeper-water settings, than current models of the Ediacaran biota had led palaeontologists to expect.

That is not a problem for evolution; it is how science progresses. Unexpected evidence does not destroy a scientific theory merely because it requires a refinement of detail. In this case, the discovery extends the known geographical, ecological and chronological range of part of the Ediacaran biota — the strange, mostly soft-bodied organisms that preceded, and helped set the stage for, the later Cambrian diversification of animal life.

When asked what would falsify the theory of evolution, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied, “a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian”. He was making the simple point that evolutionary theory predicts a broad historical sequence: mammals should not appear before vertebrates, vertebrates should not appear before animals, and rabbits should not appear hundreds of millions of years before their ancestors. A genuine rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be an anachronism so extreme that it would call the whole historical framework into question.

But that is not what palaeontologists have found here. The newly reported fossils are not out of sequence; they are exactly the kind of organisms that belong in late Precambrian rocks. The surprise is not that they are in the wrong part of life’s history, but that some of them appear a little earlier, in a wider geographical range, and in somewhat different environments than previously recognised. In other words, the anomaly is chronological and ecological, not evolutionary.

To a creationist, of course, the question of falsification has to be avoided, because the honest answer is deeply uncomfortable. The fossil record as a whole does not show a sudden magical creation of all living things a few thousand years ago. It shows succession: organisms appearing, diversifying, changing and disappearing through vast spans of geological time. The dating of the rocks, using multiple independent geological and radiometric methods, consistently points to an ancient Earth and a long history of life, not to a recent creation week followed by a global flood.

That is why every such discovery is awkward for creationism but routine for science. Fossils are not distributed randomly, as they would be if all life had been created at once and then jumbled together in a recent catastrophe. They occur in a recognisable sequence, constrained by stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, developmental biology and, for later organisms, genetics. The details are continually revised, but the broad pattern remains overwhelmingly consistent with evolution and wholly inconsistent with Biblical literalism.

By any honest application of the scientific method, that should be enough to falsify the creationist narrative beyond reasonable doubt. That it does not do so for creationists is not because the evidence is weak, but because the conclusion is protected from evidence. When the conclusion is sacred, facts become things to be explained away, misrepresented or ignored.

For evolutionary biologists, however, an unexpected fossil is not an embarrassment to be dismissed, but a clue to be investigated. If the evidence shows that part of the White Sea assemblage was present in Laurentia earlier than previously recognised, and in deeper-water environments, then the scientific response is to refine the model. The theory is not weakened by that process; it is strengthened, because it can absorb new evidence, generate better questions and produce a more accurate account of what happened.

The fossils described in this paper include more than 100 specimens, with several groups not previously recorded from North America, including Dickinsonia, Funisia, Kimberella and Eoandromeda. Some are estimated to be about 567 million years old, overlapping with the older Avalon assemblage and extending the known range of the White Sea assemblage by around 5–10 million years. The researchers also found that these organisms lived in deeper-water settings than had previously been recognised for this assemblage, supporting the idea that some early animal innovations may have begun offshore before spreading into shallower environments.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Ken Ham Shows Us His Cult Is For Fools Who Believe Lies

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

The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:

The fossil record is the graveyard of the global flood. pic.twitter.com/1OWyNcEk5o

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) May 20, 2026

What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.

Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.

We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.

So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.

Refuting Creationism - Europe's Most Complete Stegosauria Skull - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Illustration of Dacentrurus armatus.

Adrián Blázquez / Fundación Dinópolis.

Europe’s most complete stegosaurian skull unearthed in Teruel, Spain | Pensoft.blog

Another day, another dinosaur. At least, that must be how it feels to creationists trying to cling to demonstrably false beliefs by ignoring the evidence and pretending each new discovery is either a mistake, a fraud, or a sinister attempt by scientists to undermine their faith.

This time the problem comes from Teruel, Spain, where palaeontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis have described an exceptionally well-preserved partial skull of a stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Villar del Arzobispo Formation, dating to about 150 million years ago. Their results, published in May 2025 in the Pensoft journal Vertebrate Zoology, identify the fossil as belonging to Dacentrurus armatus, and as the most complete stegosaurian skull yet found in Europe.

That matters because stegosaurian skulls are notoriously rare. Their bones were fragile, and the animals’ skulls were small compared with their heavily built bodies, so cranial material is much less commonly preserved than vertebrae, limb bones, plates or tail spikes. A skull as complete as this one is therefore not just another fossil for a museum drawer, but a valuable piece of anatomical evidence for understanding how these plated, quadrupedal herbivores evolved.

Using this specimen, the researchers were able to refine the known anatomy of Dacentrurus armatus and reassess the evolutionary relationships of stegosaurs more generally. Their analysis supports the division of Stegosauria into two major clades, Huayangosauridae and Stegosauridae, and they formalise a further grouping, Neostegosauria, to include later-diverging stegosaurids. In other words, one skull from Spain helps clarify not only a single European dinosaur species, but the wider evolutionary history and geographical spread of the iconic plated dinosaurs.

If nothing else, work such as this illustrates how science treats a new discovery: not as a threat to be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with dogma, but as additional evidence to be tested against existing knowledge. Where necessary, classifications are revised, hypotheses are adjusted, and understanding moves a little closer to reality.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and then tries to make the evidence fit. Science starts with the evidence and changes the conclusion when the evidence demands it. That is why a 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull from Spain is a contribution to human knowledge, not a theological inconvenience to be waved away.

Creationism Refuted - A Giant, Intelligent Predatory Octopus - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A sketch of the giant octopus.

Image: Yohei Utsuki
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Hokkaido University.

Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago – Hokkaido University

To a conspiracy-theorist creationist who sees science as an organised plot to trick them into changing their mind, it must seem that the whole world and its dog are ganging up on them. The “conspiracy” has now spread to a team of researchers led by Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, Japan, who have announced the discovery of fossilised jaws of giant octopuses that may have been apex predators in Late Cretaceous seas, about 100 million years before creationism’s mythical “Creation Week”. Some of these animals may have reached nearly 20 metres in length, making them among the largest invertebrates yet described.

To a creationist, apparently, it is more plausible to believe that a god self-assembled out of nothing, then made an entire universe out of nothing by magic just a few thousand years ago, than to accept that Earth and life on it are the result of long, slow, scientifically demonstrable natural processes. So, when the evidence says otherwise, the evidence must somehow be forged, misrepresented or misunderstood. Besides, Bronze Age people who thought the world was flat, with a solid dome over it, said so — and what better evidence could there be than that?

What the team of researchers from several Japanese research institutions, together with Jörg Mutterlose of Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, discovered was recently published in Science. Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence model, they identified fossil jaws hidden inside rock samples from the Late Cretaceous period. The fossils, from Japan and Vancouver Island, date from between about 100 and 72 million years ago. They had been preserved in calm seafloor sediments, retaining fine details, including wear marks that reveal how these animals fed.

Based on the size and shape of the jaws, the researchers estimate that some of these extinct finned octopuses, especially Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, may have reached nearly 20 metres in total length. Their jaws show heavy chipping, scratching, cracking and polishing, consistent with repeated forceful biting into hard prey such as shells, bones or other resistant material. These were not passive, soft-bodied animals drifting harmlessly through the Cretaceous seas; they appear to have been powerful, active predators, competing in ecosystems otherwise assumed to have been dominated by large marine reptiles and sharks.

One especially intriguing finding was asymmetrical wear on the jaws. In two species, one side of the biting surface was more heavily worn than the other, suggesting that these animals may have favoured one side when handling difficult prey. This sort of behavioural lateralisation is associated in modern animals with complex neural processing, raising the possibility that advanced predatory behaviour, and perhaps a degree of intelligence, had already evolved in these early octopus relatives. The discovery also pushes the fossil record of finned octopuses back by about 15 million years, and the broader octopus record by about 5 million years.

Creationism Refuted - Another Giant Dinosaur - From SouthEast Asia, Over 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Artistic impression of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis

‘Last titan’: Southeast Asia’s biggest dinosaur discovered | UCL News - UCL – University College London

I wrote recently about how and why dinosaurs are such a problem for creationists, which is why some of them resort to the desperate and ludicrously implausible claim that non-avian dinosaurs were contemporaneous with modern humans.

Their problem has now become a little worse with the announcement, in a paper in Scientific Reports, of the discovery of a new species of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur from Thailand. The study was led by palaeontologists from University College London (UCL), Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand. The dinosaur has been named Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis and is described as the largest dinosaur yet found in Southeast Asia. Its fossilised bones were discovered about ten years ago at the edge of a communal pond in Chaiyaphum Province, north-eastern Thailand.

The scale of the animal is impressive. One of its front leg bones, the right humerus, was 1.78 metres long — about the height of an adult human. From the preserved spine, ribs, pelvis and limb bones, the researchers estimate that Nagatitan was about 27 metres long and weighed around 27 tonnes, roughly the same as nine adult Asian elephants.

Nagatitan was a sauropod — one of the long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaurs that included animals such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. More specifically, it was a somphospondylan titanosauriform, belonging to Euhelopodidae, a clade of sauropods so far known only from Asia. It lived during the Early Cretaceous, about 100–120 million years ago, in what was then a semi-arid landscape crossed by meandering rivers and inhabited by fish, freshwater sharks, crocodile-like reptiles, pterosaurs, smaller herbivorous dinosaurs and large theropod predators.

Refuting Creationism - Repopulation of Post-Glacial Britain - 5,200 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hunter-gatherers in post-glacial Britain

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Llangorse Lake and key Late Palaeolithic sites and other palaeoenvironmental records referred to in the text within the British land mass (green) and the ice sheet extent (white) at 16 ka (ref. ²).

Matthews, I.P., Palmer, A.P., Candy, I. et al.(2025).

Humans returned to British Isles earlier than previously thought at the end of the last ice age

I've posted a few examples recently showing how scientists, unlike creationists, can and do change their minds when the evidence changes. Far from being a weakness, this is one of science’s great strengths. It is creationism, with its fixed conclusions and evidence-proof dogma, that has the fundamental problem.

This post, and my next one, will look at two more such examples. Neither will bring any comfort to creationists hoping to show that science is unreliable, or that scientists simply invent data to protect some preconceived orthodoxy.

The first concerns a revised estimate of when humans returned to what are now the British Isles after the Last Glacial Maximum. The next will look at how new evidence has required a revision of the accepted view of the origins of the population of the Japanese Archipelago. Both, of course, sit very awkwardly with the Bible-based narrative that requires belief in a magical creation without ancestry, followed by a population reset in which all modern humans supposedly descend from eight survivors of a genocidal flood, radiating out from the Middle East only a few thousand years ago.

Firstly, then, the repopulation of the British Isles. It had long been assumed that people moved back into Britain from north-western Europe around 14,700 years ago, as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age. That estimate has now been pushed back by about 500 years, to around 15,200 years ago. In turn, this has forced scientists to reassess the timing and pattern of the climatic changes that made such a return possible.

The revision arose from improved geochronology and the recalibration of radiocarbon dates. Once the earliest known post-glacial human evidence in Britain was placed at about 15,200–15,000 years ago, there was an obvious problem: the existing climate models suggested that Britain should still have been too cold, not only for people, but also for the grazing animals they depended on, such as reindeer and horses.

Rather than ignore the discrepancy, or force the evidence to fit the old model, scientists did what scientists are supposed to do: they re-examined the data. A reassessment of lake-bed cores, especially from Llangorse Lake in South Wales, showed that parts of southern Britain had indeed experienced an earlier period of summer warming. This would have created the conditions for grassland expansion, the northward movement of prey species, and the return of human hunter-gatherers.

The study was conducted by a team led by Ian P. Matthews and Adrian P. Palmer of the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, who published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Adrian Palmer has also written an article in The Conversation, in which he explains their findings and why the discovery of earlier human remains made it necessary to reassess the timetable of climate change. His article is reproduced here, under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - A Possible Human Population Bottleneck - 64,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Toba supereruption

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

An Impression of the Toba Supereruption, 74,000 Years Ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived

Mount Toba in the lake formed in the volcanic caldera

Sometimes, religion can be right, but, as Sam Harris has pointed out, when it is right, it is right by accident. Religious beliefs are not based on testable evidence, predictive models or a willingness to be corrected by facts; they amount to little more than inherited guesses, protected from scrutiny by faith. In the loosest possible sense, creationist stories of a tiny ancestral human population contain an accidental echo of a real scientific idea: human ancestry includes bottlenecks, founder effects and periods when populations were small and vulnerable.

But that is where the similarity ends. There was no global flood a few thousand years ago, no ark, no family of eight repopulating the world, and no magic reset of human history in the Bronze Age Middle East. One of the real events sometimes discussed in this context occurred about 74,000 years ago, when the Toba volcano, in what is now Sumatra, Indonesia, produced one of the largest eruptions of the last 2.5 million years. The eruption ejected an estimated 672 cubic miles, or about 2,800 cubic kilometres, of volcanic material into the atmosphere, with the potential to darken skies, cool the climate and devastate ecosystems close to the volcano. [1]

For some years, this gave rise to the Toba catastrophe hypothesis: the idea that the eruption caused a volcanic winter and drove the human population down to fewer than 10,000 individuals. That would have been a dramatic genetic bottleneck, and it is easy to see why it attracted attention. However, the link between Toba and a species-wide human near-extinction is still debated, and recent archaeological and environmental evidence has increasingly complicated, and in some cases weakened, the original claim. Human groups close to the eruption may well have been wiped out, but evidence from other regions suggests continuity, survival and adaptation rather than global extinction followed by repopulation from a tiny remnant. [2]

The more interesting scientific question, therefore, is not simply whether humanity was almost wiped out, but how different human populations coped with a major environmental shock. Like many catastrophic events, the Toba eruption would have imposed severe local and regional pressures. Those who survived would not have done so because they were specially created or divinely protected, but because some populations had the behavioural flexibility, social cooperation, tool use and ecological knowledge needed to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

The evidence for the eruption and its possible effects on human evolution is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Jayde N. Hirniak, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, USA. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence:

Creationism Refuted - 240 Million-Year-Old Giant Amphibian Fossil Found In A Wall

Reconstruction of Arenaerpeton supinatus, preying on Cleithrolepis granulata.

Reconstruction by José Vitor Silva.

Arenaerpeton supinatus

From Hart, L. J., et. al(2022).

Scientists name new species of giant amphibian found in retaining wall

As a child growing up in the North Oxfordshire countryside, and already deeply interested in all things to do with nature, one of my favourite ways of looking for fossils was to search the many dry-stone walls used as field boundaries in the area. Being made largely from sedimentary limestone, they often contained fossils of ancient marine molluscs. It would probably have given a creationist nightmares to find evidence of vanished seas in a field wall, but even that is modest compared with a fossil discovered in a slab intended for use in a garden retaining wall in New South Wales, Australia.

The slab was among stones obtained in the 1990s from a local NSW quarry by a retired chicken farmer who intended to use them to build a garden retaining wall. When he spotted the fossil, however, he donated the slab to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Decades later, Australian Museum palaeontologist Lachlan J. Hart, with colleagues from the University of New South Wales and the University of Washington, Seattle, identified it as the 240-million-year-old fossil of Arenaerpeton supinatus. The fossil preserves most of the skeleton and, unusually, even shows the outline of the animal’s skin. Their formal description was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Arenaerpeton supinatus, meaning ‘supine sand creeper’, inhabited freshwater rivers in what is now the Sydney Basin during the Triassic Period, around 240 million years ago. It may have been one of the top predators in that environment, hunting ancient fish such as Cleithrolepis. Superficially, it resembled the modern Chinese giant salamander, but it was more heavily built and armed with powerful teeth, including a pair of fang-like tusks in the roof of its mouth.

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 - 'Doggerland' Was Lush Forest - Over 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Southern Doggerland, 16,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Southern 'Doggerland' 16,000 years ago.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking).

Warwick Study: Ancient Forests Under North Sea Lost World

More than 16,000 years ago, long before, according to their favourite Bronze Age mythology, creationists' little god created a small flat Earth under a dome centred on the Middle East, people and animals were able to walk from continental Europe into what are now the British Isles. They did so not by walking on water, but across dry land now submerged beneath the North Sea, of which Dogger Bank is one surviving remnant. From this lost landscape, Ice Age fossils such as mammoth teeth and tusks are still regularly dredged up in trawlers' nets.

Whatever hominins left the famous footprints at Happisburgh, Norfolk, almost certainly reached Britain on foot from western Europe, as did, much later, the hominins represented at Swanscombe in Kent and Pontnewydd Cave in Denbighshire, Wales.

Now, evidence presented in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by a team led by Professor Robin G. Allaby of Warwick University's School of Life Sciences shows that southern Doggerland was not a bleak, barren wasteland but supported temperate woodland more than 16,000 years ago. The team reached this conclusion from a detailed analysis of 252 sediment samples from 41 marine cores taken along the prehistoric Southern River in southern Doggerland, where exceptionally well-preserved deposits preserve an environmental record from the Late Pleistocene into the Holocene.

For creationists, the problem is not merely the age of this drowned landscape, awkward though that is for biblical chronology. It is the existence of the evidence itself: well-preserved, datable layers laid down over vast spans of time, preserving a coherent ecological history that can be tested, checked and verified. If biblical mythology were true, those layers should not exist in anything like this form. But they do, and they tell a story utterly at odds with Genesis.

In science, evidence that contradicts a hypothesis counts against it. A theory that repeatedly fails is supposed to be revised or abandoned. Creationism works the other way round. Evidence against it is treated not as a reason to change one's mind, but as a test of faith. By that twisted logic, the more decisively reality refutes it, the more convinced its followers become that they must be right. That is not intellectual strength. It is simply a refusal to let evidence matter.

An interesting aspect to this work, and one that may upset creationists, is the fact that the team used two different, unrelated methods for dating - carbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating which converged on the same dates.

Refuting Creationism - Rapid Evolution After The Dinosaur Extinction - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s interpretation of life and death after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The three hair-covered forms (left) represent species of plankton found inside the crater made by the impact. The geometric form (bottom left) is a species of algae. The bones belong to an extinct marine reptile.

The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences/John Maisano.

Evidence of ‘Lightning-Fast’ Evolution Found After Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

That life on Earth eventually recovered after the Chicxulub impact—the asteroid strike that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and much of the planet’s megafauna—is hardly surprising. If it had not, mammals and birds would not be the dominant land vertebrates today. What may be more surprising is how quickly that recovery appears to have begun, according to new research led by Assistant Professor Chris Lowery of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences.

Their findings have just been published in the journal Geology.

For creationists, the study presents yet another awkward problem. Not only did these events occur 66 million years ago — tens of millions of years before primates evolved, let alone the humans that some creationists insist lived alongside dinosaurs — but the results also show evolution proceeding exactly as evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rocked By Wrinkles In The Atlas Mountains Of Morocco

Dadès Valley and the Atlas Mountains

Photo by Hans Peter Schaefer, Hps-poll
http://www.reserv-a-rt.de/, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Mats of chemosynthetic bacteria forming below the layer of turbidity.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Auto)

Signs of Ancient Life Turn Up in an Unexpected Place | GSA News Release 26-02

Geologists led by Dr Rowan Martindale of the University of Texas at Austin, working with colleagues including Stéphane Bodin of Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered strange crenulated structures in rocks in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco that reveal something unexpected about microscopic life 160 million years ago. Their findings are published today in the journal Geology. The evidence, plain to see in the rocks, should not exist if creationist mythology had any basis in fact.

The reality is that, during that vast span of Earth’s history before creationists imagine their god created the small flat world with a dome over it described in the Bible, something unusual was happening deep within marine sediments that later became the Atlas Mountains. Bacteria were forming microbial mats at least 160 metres below the sea floor, far beyond the reach of sunlight.

That alone is remarkable, but what makes the discovery particularly unusual is the distinctive ripple-like crenulations the mats produced. Structures like these are normally associated with microbial mats forming on the surface of undisturbed sediment. Such mats were common before the Cambrian Period, more than 540 million years ago, when complex mobile animals had not yet evolved to burrow through and mix the seafloor. In those earlier times, microbial mats could grow across the sediment surface and preserve delicate textures and ripples.

However, once burrowing animals proliferated during the Cambrian, the upper layers of marine sediment began to be constantly churned up in a process known as bioturbation. This destroyed microbial mats and prevented the formation of the characteristic surface patterns they once produced. For the last half-billion years these textures have therefore been extremely rare in normal marine sediments, appearing today only in limited environments such as very shallow waters where photosynthetic microbial mats can still establish themselves.

Yet the Moroccan rocks contain similar crenulated structures formed about 160 million years ago—hundreds of millions of years after burrowing animals had transformed the seafloor. The explanation is that these features formed not at the surface but deep within the sediment, where chemosynthetic microbes were able to grow undisturbed by burrowing organisms. Instead of relying on sunlight and organic debris, these microbes obtained energy from chemical reactions involving minerals in the sediment itself.

Far from supporting creationist assertions that life cannot arise from inorganic sources, chemosynthetic microbes have been exploiting chemical energy from rocks and minerals for billions of years.

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 - Earth - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Impact-formed glass evidence of cosmic collision in Brazil about 6 million years ago

Geologists led by Professor Álvaro Penteado Crósta of the Institute of Geosciences at the State University of Campinas, Brazil (IG-UNICAMP), in collaboration with researchers from Brazil, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, have discovered evidence of an impact by a large extraterrestrial body at least 6.3 million years ago.

They have recently published their findings in the journal Geology. This impact joins the long list of such collisions in Earth’s history — not merely the one that marked the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction that eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs.

Creationists like to imagine they live in some sort of wonderland, specially created with them in mind — perfectly designed for human existence. Of course, this ignores the fact that much of the Earth is uninhabitable and even actively hostile to human life without specialised equipment. They often refer to Earth as existing in a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where everything is “just right”, forgetting that life could only have evolved on a planet where conditions permitted it. Our existence does not demonstrate improbability; it simply confirms that the necessary conditions were present.

Away from the tropics, ordinary human life is only possible with clothing, heating and buildings — or at least some form of shelter and a means of making fire. None of us would survive for more than a few hours naked outdoors in mid-winter at northern or southern latitudes.

Much of the planet is covered by deep oceans, and large areas of land consist of high plateaus or arid deserts where human life would again be impossible without specialised technology.

It also ignores the fact that, throughout its history, Earth has endured catastrophe after catastrophe. Mass extinctions have often been triggered by plate tectonics, which alter ocean currents and weather patterns, or by volcanic activity that disrupts the balance between CO₂ production and its removal by plants. Earth exists within a cosmos capable of bombarding it with the debris left over from planetary formation — from microscopic dust grains to vast bodies of rock that release enough energy on impact to devastate regions hundreds of kilometres across. Such collisions can inject enormous quantities of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight for years and plunging the planet into prolonged global cooling, with devastating ecological consequences.

Refuting Creationism - Our Earliest Animal Ancestors May Have Been Sea Sponges - 541 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge, according to MIT geochemists who unearthed new evidence in very old rocks.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Another fatal blow against creationism was revealed recently by geochemists led by Professor Roger E. Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with news that they have found chemical evidence in ancient rocks suggesting that the earliest animals may have been the ancestors of sponges, living some 541 million years ago. Their findings have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

They succeeded in extracting the chemical signature of animal life from rocks in Oman, where they found an abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C₃₀) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was most likely derived from ancient sea sponges known as demosponges.

Not only is this fatal to creationists' notion of Earth being just a few thousand years old, with all living organisms magically created without ancestry and with different “kinds” unrelated to other “kinds”, but it also delivers another hammer blow to the creationist parody of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' as a literal explosive creation of multiple body plans in a single event. Slightly more sophisticated creationists attempt to claim that this was the act of creation for which the tales in Genesis are merely a metaphor, with each day of 'creation week' representing millions of years — a claim that collapses on realisation that, according to Genesis, green plants would have had to exist for millions of years with no sun to drive photosynthesis, since the sun is supposedly created the 'day' after plants.

This analysis pushes the origins of the Cambrian biota back into the Ediacaran, showing not a sudden spontaneous creation 540 million years ago, but the cumulative products of evolutionary diversification, probably beginning with these early multicellular organisms.
In addition to Professor Roger E. Summons of MIT, the team included Dr Lubna Shawar of Caltech, Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Creationism Refuted - The Oldest Known Human Remains in Northern Britain Are From 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

A Mesolithic burial, 11,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Figure 3. View facing west over the surface of the deposits in the main chamber at the start of the current fieldwork, showing the paint markings made by Mr Redshaw.

Photo by Martin Stables.

DNA analysis reveals Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child

A good thousand years before creationism’s god allegedly created the first two humans, the body of a young girl was being buried in a cave in Cumbria, northern England.

This unwelcome news for creationists comes from an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire, who have just published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

The girl’s remains were discovered about three years ago in Heaning Wood Bone Cave by local archaeologist Martin Stables, from the nearby village of Great Urswick. The University of Lancashire team have now succeeded in extracting enough DNA to determine that she was between about 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.

Jewellery in the form of a deer tooth pendant and pierced beads has been radiocarbon dated to around 11,000 years ago, strongly suggesting this was a deliberate burial. This raises the question of why the cave held such significance as a burial site. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often regard caves as gateways to a spirit world, so it is possible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe held similar beliefs.

The team also showed that at least eight other individuals were buried in the cave over a period spanning roughly 4,000–11,000 years ago, from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age — ironically, the latter being the period when the creation myths of the Bible were being invented. The authors of those Bronze Age stories, of course, would have known nothing whatever of hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, their cultural history, or their spiritual traditions.

No doubt we will see the traditional creationist misrepresentation of this evidence, with unfounded assertions that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work” and that scientists simply make things up to conform to some notional Darwinian narrative. Making things up to fit a pre-existing story is something creationists themselves routinely do. It seems to be characteristic of those who set out to deceive that they accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves practise.

Refuting Creationism - Stone Tool Sophistication and Multiple Hominin Species in East Asia - 150,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tool manufacture in China

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5.2)

Discovery challenges long-held beliefs on early human technology in East Asia - Griffith News

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with palaeoanthropologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University, have just published an open-access paper in Nature Communications presenting evidence of advanced stone-tool technology dating to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago in China.

This represents a significant shift in our understanding of the development and diversity of stone-tool technologies in East Asia. For many years it was assumed that stone technology in China lacked complexity and sophistication because bamboo provided a more versatile alternative — the so-called “Bamboo Hypothesis”. Archaeologists now have compelling reasons to revise that view.

If there is one thing calculated to excite creationists, it is the fact that scientists frequently change their minds when the evidence changes — an essential feature of the scientific method. In the simplistic binary worldview common to creationism, however, science is either right or wrong. Any revision of conclusions is therefore taken as proof that science is “wrong”, and that creationism wins by default, without needing to provide any supporting evidence of its own.

From this it follows, in the creationist imagination, that if scientists were wrong about stone-tool technology in China, they must also be wrong about human evolution and the age of the Earth. Consequently, the very evidence that caused scientists to revise their views — sophisticated tools securely dated to 160,000–72,000 years ago — must itself also be wrong. Few creationists seem to notice the paradox of arguing that science must be wrong because evidence corrected it, while simultaneously insisting that the correcting evidence is also wrong. Within the confines of the creationist rabbit hole, believing six impossible things before breakfast merely requires practice.

Nevertheless, the evidence from Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region of central China, shows that stone-tool manufacture was not only an advanced skill but may also have been practised by more than one species of hominin. By this time, humans had already diversified into several relatively large-brained species, well before modern Homo sapiens had migrated into Eurasia in significant numbers.

The tools themselves show clear evidence of hafting — the fitting of handles to stone implements — representing the earliest known composite tools in East Asia. This implies an ability to plan ahead and to understand how tool performance could be enhanced, combined with a high level of technical skill and craftsmanship.

Refuting Crationism - How Climate Change Shaped the Evolution of Kangaroos And Wallabies

Red-necked wallaby

QUT - Study maps climate-related evolution of modern kangaroos and wallabies

In a clear example of how evolution is driven by environmental change, a study by scientists at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), led by Professor Matthew J. Phillips, has shown how closely the evolution of Australia’s kangaroos and wallabies maps onto the continent’s long-term climate history. Their findings are published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

By tracing the climate record over the last 18 million years and comparing it with the fossil record, the team showed that increasing aridity and habitat variability around 7–9 million years ago coincided with the emergence of the macropodines — the group to which most modern kangaroos and wallabies belong. This was followed by the appearance of incipient grasslands around 5–4.5 million years ago, a period that saw a major diversification of kangaroo and wallaby species.

As expected, there is no evidence of sudden creation without ancestors 6,000–10,000 years ago, nor of a wholesale biological reset following a global flood a few thousand years ago. Instead, the record is one of gradual evolution over deep time, driven by environmental change. The long-predicted failure of the Theory of Evolution to explain and make sense of the evidence once again failed to materialise, as it has every time creationists have claimed it was imminent over the past half-century.

Rather than contradicting evolutionary theory, the evidence fits it like a hand in a glove, adding yet another piece to the growing mountain of supporting data. Once again, the underpinning theory of modern biology is shown to be supported by independent lines of evidence from geology, climatology, and palaeontology, all converging on the same conclusion: life has evolved on an ancient planet responding continuously to changing environments.

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.