Transitional Form News - Precambrian Common Ancestor of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematode Worms

3D laser scans enable the researchers to study the fossils’ shape and curvature.

Droser Lab/UCR

Researchers Scott Evans (left) and Ian Hughes examine a fossil bed at Nilpena Ediacara National Park.

Droser Lab/UCR.

Tiny worm makes for big evolutionary discovery | UCR News | UC Riverside

The refutation of creationism continues today with news of another one of those 'non-existent' transitional species that turn up with monotonous regularity only to be dismissed by creationists as 'not transitional but fully formed' with now two gaps in the record where there was originally one, or by simply dismissing the dating method as unreliable and coincidentally wrong by an order of magnitude sufficient to make 6-10,000 years look like x-million years.
Another big disappointment for creationists is the fact that this one is from before the Cambrian when their traditional disinformation claims lots of species popped into existence without ancestors by magic in a single event called the 'Cambrian explosion'. The Cambrian 'explosion' was of course a period of some 6-10 million years during which many of the basic body plans of multicellular organisms evolved.

This fossil however was before then and was clearly the ancestral stem species from which a whole range of Cambrian organism, collectively known as Ecdysozoa evolved. These are a group of organisms with an outer cuticle which is shed periodically as the organism grows. The vast group includes nematode worms and arthropods such as insects, spiders, crustaceans like crabs, shrimps, lobsters, and the horseshow crab. So, this discovery, which the palaeontologists have named Uncus dzaugisi sits at the base of this branch of the evolutionary tree. It resembled a nematode worm.

Tell me all about the Ecdysozoa, please. Ecdysozoa is a major clade of animals within the larger group known as Protostomia, distinguished by their unique mode of growth, which involves periodic moulting of an external cuticle. The term "ecdysozoa" comes from the Greek word ecdysis, meaning "to strip off" or "to shed," referring to this moulting process.

Characteristics of Ecdysozoa

1. Moulting (Ecdysis):
   • The defining feature of Ecdysozoans is the shedding of their cuticle—a tough, non-living outer layer made of proteins, polysaccharides (like chitin), or collagen. This process allows them to grow, as the rigid cuticle limits continuous size increase.
   • After moulting, a new, larger cuticle is secreted, which hardens over time.
2. Body Structure:
   • Many have a hydrostatic skeleton, relying on fluid pressure in their body cavity for movement and structure.
   • Most lack cilia or flagella in their adult form, distinguishing them from other protostomes.
3. Diversity:
   • The group includes some of the most diverse and abundant organisms on Earth, ranging from microscopic species to large, visible ones.
4. Nervous System:
   • Typically, they have a ventral nerve cord and a dorsal brain, with varied sensory adaptations.

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Major Groups Within Ecdysozoa
Ecdysozoa includes eight phyla, with two of the most well-known being Arthropoda and Nematoda:

1. Arthropoda
   • The largest and most diverse group of animals, including insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods.
   • They have segmented bodies, jointed appendages, and a hard exoskeleton.
   • Examples: Butterflies, crabs, spiders, centipedes.
2. Nematoda (Roundworms)
   • Microscopic to macroscopic worms with a cylindrical, unsegmented body.
   • Found in nearly every habitat on Earth, often as parasites in plants and animals.
   • Examples: Caenorhabditis elegans (a model organism), Ascaris (a human intestinal parasite).
3. Tardigrada (Water Bears)
   • Microscopic, water-dwelling animals known for their extreme resilience to harsh environments.
   • They can survive desiccation, radiation, and even the vacuum of space.
4. Onychophora (Velvet Worms)
   • Segmented, soft-bodied terrestrial animals with slime glands used for capturing prey.
5. Priapulida
   • Marine worms with a tubular body, often found burrowing in sediment.
6. Kinorhyncha
   • Tiny, segmented marine animals often referred to as "mud dragons."
7. Loricifera
   • Microscopic animals inhabiting marine sediment, with a complex, retractable body.
8. Nematomorpha (Horsehair Worms)
   • Parasites as larvae, often controlling the behaviour of their insect hosts.

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Evolution and Phylogeny

• Ecdysozoa was proposed as a clade in 1997, based on molecular evidence (notably studies of ribosomal RNA).
• They share a common ancestor with other protostomes but diverged early to adopt their unique moulting strategy.
• Their evolutionary success is evident in their sheer numbers and adaptability, especially in arthropods.

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Ecological and Economic Importance

1. Ecological Roles:
   • Many ecdysozoans are key components of ecosystems as decomposers, predators, prey, and parasites.
   • Insects, a subgroup of arthropods, are critical for pollination and nutrient cycling.
2. Economic Impact:
   • Beneficial: Insects (e.g., bees) aid in agriculture, while nematodes play a role in soil health.
   • Harmful: Some ecdysozoans are pests or parasites causing diseases in humans, animals, and crops.

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Fun Facts

• Tardigrades can enter a state called cryptobiosis, surviving for decades without water or food.
• Arthropods are the most successful phylum, with over a million described species, and likely many more undiscovered.
• Nematodes may account for about 80% of individual animals on Earth.

The discovery was made by a team from University of California, Riverside (UCR), led by Professor Mary Droser a distinguished professor of geology. The have explained their findings in the journal, Current Biology, and in a UCR press release:

Tiny worm makes for big evolutionary discovery

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UC Riverside scientists have described ‘Uncus,’ the oldest ecdysozoan and the first from the Precambrian period

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Everyone has a past. That includes the millions of species of insects, arachnids, and nematode worms that make up a major animal group called the Ecdysozoa. Until recently, details about this group’s most distant past have been elusive. But a UC Riverside-led team has now identified the oldest known ecdysozoan in the fossil record and the only one from the Precambrian period. Their discovery of Uncus dzaugisi, a worm-like creature rarely over a few centimeters in length, is described in a paper published today in Current Biology.

Scientists have hypothesized for decades that this group must be older than the Cambrian, but until now its origins have remained enigmatic. This discovery reconciles a major gap between predictions based on molecular data and the lack of described ecdysozoans prior to the rich Cambrian fossils record and adds to our understanding of the evolution of animal life.

Mary L. Droser, co-author Earth and Planetary Sciences University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA , USA.

The ecdysozoans are the largest and most species-rich animal group on Earth, encompassing more than half of all animals. Characterized by their cuticle — a tough external skeleton that is periodically shed — the group comprises three subgroups: nematodes, which are microscopic worms; arthropods, which include insects, spiders, and crustaceans; and scalidophora, an eclectic group of small, scaly marine creatures.

Like many modern-day animal groups, ecdysozoans were prevalent in the Cambrian fossil record and we can see evidence of all three subgroups right at the beginning of this period, about 540 million years ago. We know they didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and so the ancestors of all ecdysozoans must have been present during the preceding Ediacaran period.

Ian V. Hughes, first author
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

DNA-based analyses, used to predict the age of animal groups by comparing them with their closest living relatives, have corroborated this hypothesis. Yet ecdysozoan fossil animals have remained hidden among scores of animal fossils paleontologists have discovered from the Ediacaran Period.

Top: Uncus fossil from Nilpena Ediacara National Park. The numbers correspond to the coordinates of this fossil on the fossil bed surface. Bottom: 3D laser scans enable the researchers to study the fossils’ shape and curvature.

Droser Lab/UCR.

Ediacaran animals, which lived 635-538 million years ago, were ocean dwellers; their remains preserved as cast-like impressions on the seabed that later hardened to rock. Hughes said uncovering them is a labor-intensive, delicate process that involves peeling back rock layers, flipping them over, dusting them off, and piecing them back together to get “a really nice snapshot of the sea floor.”

This excavation process has only been done at Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia, a site Droser and her team have been working at for 25 years that is known for its beautifully preserved Ediacaran fossils.

Nilpena is perhaps the best fossil site for understanding early animal evolution in the world because the fossils occur during a period of heightened diversity and we are able to excavate extensive layers of rock that preserve these snapshots. The layer where we found Uncus is particularly exciting because the sediment grains are so small that we really see all the details of the fossils preserved there.

Assistant Professor Scott Evans, co-author
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA.

While the team didn’t set out to find an early ecdysozoan during their 2018 excavation, they were drawn to a mysterious worm-like impression that they dubbed “fishhook.”

Sometimes we make dramatic discoveries and sometimes we excavate an entire bed and say ‘hmmm, I’ve been looking at that thing, what do you think?’ That’s what happened here. We had all sort of noticed this fishhook squiggle on the rock. It was pretty prominent because it was really, really deep.

Because it was deep, we knew it wasn’t smooshed easily so it must have had a pretty rigid body. At this point we knew this was a new fossil animal and it belong to the Ecdysozoa.

Ian V. Hughes

After seeing more of the worm-like squiggles the team paid closer attention, taking note of fishhook’s characteristics. Other defining characteristics include its distinct curvature and the fact that it could move around — seen by trace fossils in the surrounding area. Paul De Ley, an associate professor of nematology at UCR, confirmed its fit as an early nematode and ruled out other worm types.

The team called the new animal Uncus, which means “hook” in Latin, noting in the paper its similarities to modern-day nematodes. Hughes said the team was excited to find evidence of what scientists had long predicted; that ecdysozoans existed in the Ediacaran Period.

It’s also really important for our understanding of what these early animal groups would have looked like and their lifestyle, especially as the ecdysozoans would really come to dominate the marine ecosystem in the Cambrian.

Ian V. Hughes

The paper is titled “An Ediacaran bilateran with an ecdysozoan affinity from South Australia.” Funding for the research came from NASA.

Highlights

• A new, motile bilaterian is described from the Ediacaran of South Australia
• Features including morphology and movement suggest an ecdysozoan affinity
• This discovery firmly places ecdysozoans in the Precambrian

Summary
Molecular clocks and Cambrian-derived metazoans strongly suggest a Neoproterozoic origin of many animal clades.^1,2,3,4 However, fossil bilaterians are rare in the Ediacaran, and no definitive ecdysozoan body fossils are known from the Precambrian. Notably, the base of the Cambrian is characterized by an abundance of trace fossils attributed to priapulid worms,^5,6 suggesting that major divisions among ecdysozoan groups occurred prior to this time. This is supported by ichnofossils from the latest Ediacaran or early Cambrian left by a plausible nematoid,^7,8,9 although definitively attributing this inferred behavior to crown-Nematoida remains contentious in the absence of body fossils.¹⁰ Given the high probability of the evolution of Ecdysozoa in the Proterozoic, the otherwise prolific fossil record of the Ecdysozoa, and the identification of more than 100 distinct Ediacaran genera, it is striking that no Ediacaran body fossils have been confidently assigned to this group. Here, we describe Uncus dzaugisi gen. et. sp. nov. from the Ediacara Member (South Australia), a smooth, vermiform organism with distinct curvature and anterior-posterior differentiation. The depth of relief of Uncus is unique among Ediacara fossils and consistent with a rigid outer cuticle. Ecological relationships and associated trace fossils demonstrate that Uncus was motile. Body morphology and the inferred style of movement are consistent with Nematoida, providing strong evidence for at least an ecdysozoan affinity. This validates the Precambrian origin of Ecdysozoa, reconciling a major gap between predicted patterns of animal evolution and the fossil record.⁴

Hughes, Ian V.; Evans, Scott D.; Droser, Mary L.
An Ediacaran bilaterian with an ecdysozoan affinity from South Australia
Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.030

© 2024 Elsevier.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

I think my favourite quote from one of the scientists is "We know they didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and so the ancestors of all ecdysozoans must have been present during the preceding Ediacaran period", which just about describes the difference between someone who knows the Theory of Evolution is correct because he understands the evidence for it, and a creationists who believes in fully formed living organisms made from nothing, magically popping into existence from nowhere, with magic spells cast by an unproven supernatural deity their mummy and daddy told them about.

The ancestral form, the transitional species, was in exactly for rock formation of exactly the right age which the theory of evolutionary decent with modifiction from a common ancester predicted.

And in case a creationist is tempted to try the 'radiometric dating is flawed/wrong/faked fallacy. The Ediacaran rock formation these fossils were found in was independently dated several different ways that all converged on a 98-million-year span from 635 to 538 million years ago known as the Ediacaran. The Most important being the Uranium-Lead (U-Pb) dating of zircons found in the layers of volcanic ash sandwiched within the rocks. To compress 600 million years of radioactive decay into less than 6-10,000 years would have caused Earth's rocks to melt and the seas to boil away. And the weak nuclear force would have been so weak that atoms could not have formed, let alone life, and there would have been no planet and no universe to fine tune for it either.

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Refuting Creationism - How Eggs Evolved Hundred of Millions of Years Before Chickens

A cell of the ichthyosporean C. perkinsii showing distinct signs of polarity, with clear cortical localization of the nucleus before the first cleavage. Microtubules are shown in magenta, DNA in blue, and the nuclear envelope in yellow.

© DudinLab

Chromosphaera perkinsii resembles the early stages of animal embryo development during its multicellular life stage

DudinLab

The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg! - Medias - UNIGE

Scientists believe they may have cracked the chicken and egg 'problem' that creationists have been fooled into thinking is a killer problem for the Theory of Evolution. With their child-like understanding of evolution, creationists can't imagine how species emerge over time from earlier species by a process of evolution and think that their mythical magic creation without ancestors is actually what happens, or at least what evolutionary biologists think happens. So, they imagine explaining how the first chicken hatched from the first egg before there was a chicken to lay it, is an insurmountable problem.

In fact, of course there never was a first chicken just as there never was a first human, and eggs are simply a phase in the life cycle of, in this case, chickens, so hens' eggs are chickens just as much so as adult hens are. The ancestral species that the Southeast Asian jungle fowl evolved from had been laying eggs ever since they diverged from the egg-laying avian dinosaurs that had evolved from the egg-laying theropod dinosaurs, etc, etc, back to the egg-laying tunicates and chordates in the Cambrian and their egg-laying ancestors...

Refuting Creationism - Walking With Dinosaurs 70-75 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist's depiction of H. piceanus in a Late Cretaceous swamp.

Illustration by Brian Engh
LivingRelicProductions.com

Paleontologists discover Colorado ‘swamp dweller’ that lived alongside dinosaurs | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder

Paleontologists dig for fossils in northwestern Colorado.

Credit: John and ReBecca Foster.

AI-Generated illustration of life in a Cretaceous swamp near the Western Inland Seaway

ChatGPT4o

For some reason creationists have a fixation with dinosaurs, probably because, deep down, they know their existence refutes the biblical nonsense of an Earth that's only 6-10,000 years old. After all, there is nothing quite like a 75 million-year-old fossil of a living creature for falsifying the idea that the Universe, Earth and life on it were all created in a single week, just a few thousand years ago.

So, their cult leaders are forever scraping around trying to find evidence that human beings and dinosaurs lived together and even that Jesus would have been familiar with T. rex or Diplodocus and was probably used to pterosaurs flying overhead. But of course, there is none - which was never a reason for a creationist to abandon a delusion.

What there is, however, is evidence that dinosaurs were around until about 66 million years ago then promptly went extinct to be replaced by birds and mammals as the dominant terrestrial life forms.

And now we have evidence of an early mammal living amongst dinosaurs in what if now Colorado, USA. Sadly, there is no evidence that the early mammal resembled Jesus or any other humans for that matter; it was more like a muskrat.

Refuting Creationism - Aotearoa New Zealand's Rich Fauna - 20 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

St Bathans Fauna

AI-generated (ChatGPT4o)

Artist's impression of the Miocene landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island

Kākāpō are the true ancient species of Aotearoa… | Canterbury Museum

The Bronze Age Middle Eastern Pastoralists who made up the Hebrew origin myths could have known nothing about a southern hemisphere, let alone archipelagoes like New Zealand (or to give the name that more accurately reflects its dual cultures, Māori and European, Aotearoa New Zealand) and they knew nothing of the rich history of Earth's wildlife, so they said not a word about it in their mythology.

So, we have the ludicrous situation where a sizable proportion of people - especially Americans - think nothing older than about 10,000 years and nothing that wasn't known to parochial Middle Eastern pastoralists, ever existed, despite the abundant evidence that it did and that it had ancestors very much older.

What information do you have on the St* Bathan's fauna found in the Bannockburn Formation on New Zealand's South Island? The St. Bathans Fauna is a remarkable fossil assemblage from the Early Miocene (around 19-16 million years ago) found in the Bannockburn Formation in New Zealand's South Island. Discovered near the small town of St. Bathans, this fossil site is part of the Manuherikia Group, which is known for providing a window into New Zealand's unique prehistoric ecosystem.

Here’s a detailed overview of the St. Bathans fauna and its significance:

1. Paleontological Importance
   • The fossils represent a critical period when New Zealand was transitioning from being an isolated landmass with its own flora and fauna. This period is significant for the evolution of New Zealand's unique species after it split from Gondwana.
   • The St. Bathans Fauna provides insights into how climate change affected New Zealand's environment and species during the Miocene epoch. At that time, the region was much warmer and covered with subtropical forests and wetlands, a stark contrast to the cooler, drier conditions that followed in the Pliocene and Pleistocene.
2. Vertebrate Fossils
   • Birds: The site is most famous for its extensive and diverse avian fossil record. Notable examples include:
     • The giant flightless bird species similar to moa (though these are not the moa we are familiar with).
     • Ancient species of waterfowl, shorebirds, and parrots, some of which are now extinct.
     • Fossils of a possible heron species, various songbirds, and even a previously unknown eagle.
   • Mammals: Mammal fossils in New Zealand are rare, but the St. Bathans site yielded intriguing examples of early mammals. These include:
     • A small, shrew-like mammal (perhaps representing one of the only land mammals known in New Zealand before humans introduced others).
     • Marsupial fossils that hint at a lineage distinct from modern marsupials in Australasia.
   • Reptiles: Various lizard and possible gecko remains have been found, along with fossils that may represent tuatara ancestors.
   • Fish: Several species of freshwater fish, especially primitive forms such as galaxiids, have been found, showing that New Zealand's fish diversity extended back tens of millions of years.
3. Flora
   • Plant fossils from the same region indicate that the Miocene landscape was densely vegetated with subtropical and temperate plants, including ferns, conifers, and flowering plants. The existence of forests and wetlands provided ideal habitats for the wide variety of animals found there.
4. Significance for Climate and Ecological Studies
   • The St. Bathans fauna gives researchers a clear picture of what New Zealand's environment was like during a warmer period of Earth's history, making it invaluable for studies on climate change and its impact on ecosystems over time.
   • It shows a diversity of life forms that existed before the drastic cooling in the Pliocene, which led to the extinction of several species.
5. Unique Species
   • One of the notable discoveries includes a species dubbed the "St. Bathans mammal," which is a mysterious, small mammal species. New Zealand is generally known for its lack of native land mammals, but this discovery suggests that mammals may have once been present in ancient New Zealand, challenging previous assumptions.
   • Bird species found in the Bannockburn Formation are also unique, some showing traits that link them to extinct lineages or suggest evolutionary connections with species outside New Zealand.

The St. Bathans fossil site continues to be a rich source of paleontological discovery, providing ongoing insights into the Miocene ecosystems of New Zealand and the biogeographical history of its fauna and flora.

For example, palaeontologists are discovering more fossils of the so-called St Bathan's fauna that charcterised Aotearoa New Zealand's South Island, most of which are of extinct species. These are being found in rocks known as the Bannockburn Formation that formed in an ancient lake by a team led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of Flinders University, Australia and including Dr Paul Scofield, senior curator of natural history, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Geobios:

Kākāpō are the true ancient species of Aotearoa New Zealand

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Aotearoa New Zealand’s true ancient species are animals like Kākāpō, small wrens, bats and freshwater limpets, not recent Aussie immigrants like kiwi, moa and takahē.

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This is the conclusion reached by an international team of palaeontologists after two decades of groundbreaking research at the St Bathans fossil site in Central Otago recently published in Geobios.

The team, including Canterbury Museum Senior Curator Natural History Dr Paul Scofield, have been excavating the large St Bathans site since 2001, uncovering thousands of fossil bones. The site, which was once at the bottom of a large prehistoric lake, offers the only significant insight into Aotearoa‘s non-marine wildlife from 20 million years ago.

The new research summarises the extraordinary creatures discovered in the more than 9,000 specimens collected across 23 years. Exotic creatures identified at the site include a giant parrot that the scientists nicknamed “Squawkzilla”, two mystery mammals, flamingos, a 3-metre crocodile, a giant horned turtle and a giant bat.

Reconstruction of the 1m tall giant parrot Heracles inexpectatus, dwarfing a bevy of 8 cm high Kuiornis – small New Zealand wrens scuttling about on the forest floor.

Illustration: Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University.

Paul Scofield, who has been involved in digs at St Bathans since 2002, said the research had prompted a rethink of our native fauna.

Many of the species that we thought of as iconic New Zealand natives – a classic example would be the takahē – we now know are relatively recent blow-ins from Australia, arriving only a few million years ago. Twenty-three years of digging at St Bathans has changed our idea about the age of the New Zealand fauna and the importance of some animals over others. For example, until now we thought that birds like kiwi and moa were among the oldest representatives of New Zealand fauna. We are now realising that the Kākāpō, tiny New Zealand wrens and bats, and even a bizarre freshwater limpet, are the real ancient New Zealand natives.

Dr Paul Scofield, co-author
Canterbury Museum
Christchurch, New Zealand

The research concludes that this menagerie of exotic animals was wiped out by dramatic temperature drops over the last about 5 million years.

Lead author Flinders University Associate Professor Trevor Worthy said 23 years of research at St Bathans had transformed our understanding of how non-marine vertebrate life in New Zealand looked around 20 million years ago during the Early Miocene era.

It’s exciting to be involved in a project that continues to make absolutely fresh discoveries about what animals lived in New Zealand’s lakes and rivers, and the forests around them, during this critical period in history. Every year we find new specimens. Finds that reveal amazing new species that we couldn’t have imagined when we first started working there.

Associate Professor Trevor H. Worthy, lead author
College of Science and Engineering
Flinders University
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Study co-author Dr Vanesa De Pietri of the University of Canterbury said the animals that lived in New Zealand 20 million years ago were very different to what we have now.

For example, we had another giant eagle that was not related to Haast’s Eagle. We had a whole bunch of songbirds that were quite different, crocodiles and even potentially a small mammal that we’ve nicknamed the waddling mouse. We are still in the middle of our research into understanding exactly what that was.

Dr Vanesa L. De Pietri, co-author
School of Earth and Environment
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand.

The latest research paper was a collaboration between Flinders University, Canterbury Museum, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury, The University of Queensland, University of Copenhagen and University of New South Wales.

Artist's impression of the St. Bathans Fauna. Source: New Zealand Geographic

Illustrations: Tom Simpson

Abstract
The St Bathans Fauna, from sites near the village of St Bathans, Central Otago, South Island, is the first substantive pre-Quaternary terrestrial vertebrate fossil fauna discovered in New Zealand. This fauna derives from 33 sites or discrete sedimentary beds located in the lower 50 m of the lacustrine Bannockburn Formation, Manuherikia Group, and is generally accepted as local stage Altonian (19–15.9 Ma; Burdigalian, Early Miocene) in age. Investigations since 2001 have revealed an abundant and diverse fauna from over 9000 catalogued lots that is herein reviewed. Invertebrates notably include eight genera and species of terrestrial molluscs. Among vertebrates, freshwater fish remains dominate with 17 species evidenced by 16,500 analysed otoliths (genera Neochanna, Galaxias, Prototroctes, and Mataichthys) and many thousands of bones. Birds (minimally 45 species, several thousand bones) are the most common non-fish vertebrates, among which waterfowls dominate all assemblages (10 species). Co-occurring with these was a diverse herpetofauna, including undetermined crocodylians and a terrestrial turtle, both absent in Recent faunas. Significantly, the St Bathans Fauna evidences that Zealandia already had all of New Zealand’s ‘old’ endemic Recent taxa (sphenodontids, leiopelmatids, dinornithiforms, apterygids, aptornithids, strigopoid parrots, acanthisittids, and mystacinids) during the Early Miocene. Furthermore, it includes Australasia’s oldest ardeids, two flightless rallids, a novel higher landbird family, a greater diversity of bats, and terrestrial mammals. All sites reflect a single fauna, except that the ducks Manuherikia lacustrina (stratigraphically lower in section) and M. primadividua (higher) have a mutually exclusive distribution that is not yet correlated with any other biotic distribution differences.

1. Introduction New Zealand is a small emergent part of the India-sized continent of Zealandia that is largely submerged and from which New Caledonia, Lord Howe, Norfolk Island, the Chatham Islands, and the New Zealand subantarctic islands all project (Mortimer et al., 2017, Strogen et al., 2023). The New Zealand archipelago includes 800+ islands >1 ha, totalling 270,000 km2, of which North Island (114,740 km2) and South Island (151,120 km2) are the largest. Mainland New Zealand (North and South islands) averages ca. 2000 km from Australia. Seafloor-spreading that initiated 85–80 Ma in the south of the present Tasman Sea gradually rifted the new continent Zealandia from Eastern Gondwana, with rifting complete in the north by 60–55 Ma (Gaina et al., 1998, Schellart et al., 2006). The recent reconstructions by Strogen et al. (2023) developed these early models and in addition have a focus on land on Zealandia. They show Zealandia became fully separated from the Australian part of East Gondwana ca. 57 Ma although land connections had already been severed in the preceding few million years (Strogen et al., 2023). Thereafter, land area was progressively reduced, as the continent submerged, until the Late Oligocene marine highstand when ∼150,000 km2 remained (Strogen et al., 2023). Subsequently, land area increased, especially after the Australia–Pacific plate boundary migrated from its mid-Tasman Sea spreading centre to become propagated through New Zealand during the Early Miocene ∼18–16 Ma forming the Alpine Fault and resulting in regional uplift.

Worthy, Trevor H.; Paul Scofield, R.; De Pietri, Vanesa L.; Salisbury, Steven W.; Schwarzhans, Werner; Hand, Suzanne J.; Archer, Michael
A synopsis of the Early Miocene St Bathans Fauna of New Zealand
Geobios (2024), DOI: 10.1016/j.geobios.2024.03.002

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

If only the authors of Genesis had been a little better informed about the real world and its history, they could have come up with at least a half plausible creation myth by including some of the fauna from distant lands from millions of years ago, even if they felt they had to include magic to explain a world they thought ran on it.

As it was, their parochial ignorance was about the worst imaginable preparation for the task, hence the laughable result that could only be believed by someone at least as parochially ignorant as they were.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Became 'Fine-Tuned' For Death And Extinction

Fine-Tuned for death.
Artist's impression of Earth during the Great Dying

Richard Jones/Science Source

The synapsid Lystrosaurus survived the mass extinction and came to dominate the landscape later.

Julio Lacerda

September: El Nino | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationist claims that Earth was created perfectly designed for life (especially their life) are farcical and can only be believed by people carefully ignorant of the facts.

Of course, insisting that Earth is merely a few thousand years old, makes it easier to dismiss the 99.9975% of it that proves them wrong.

In my previous post I wrote about a newly-discovered trilobite with an additional pair of legs, and the reason we don't have them scuttling over marine sediment any more is because Earth turned against them when a climate catastrophe caused a marine catastrophe, depriving the oxygen-dependent organism's living in it of oxygen. This was one of the so-called Oceanic Deoxygenation Events.

That explains the mass extinction of marine life, but the question is, why did it also cause a terrestrial mass extinction of comparative severity?

Refuting Creationism - Not Whether But How And Where - Scientists Reassess The Fossil Record Of Human Evolution

The Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania

Wikimedia Commons: Noel Feans

A human evolutionary tree. The dashed lines indicate that evolutionary relationships between species are uncertain. Note the 'bushiness' of the tree; the australopithecine line branches into several species of Australopithecus and also to several Homo species

Open University/Douglas Palmer and Patricia Ash

Fossil hotspots in Africa obscure a more complete picture of human evolution | Media Relations | The George Washington University

The Modern Theory of Evolution is not just an interpretation of the fossil record. It's not even an interpretation of the fossil record, but an explanation of the genetic, cladistic, physiological, anatomical and molecular evidence, all of which converge on the same explanation, supported by, but not dependent on, the fossil record.

That conclusion is species have evolved from earlier ancestors by a process of evolutionary divergence from common ancestors.

The problem of being too dependent on the fossil record, which is inevitable when the genetic, physiological and biochemical evidence is no longer available is that, because of the rarity of fossilisation which depends on a body finding itself in the right place at the right time, is that it is essentially a random sampling process which produces a snapshot of the population at that time and place, randomly placed both temporally and geographically.

With some places (and times) being more conducive to producing fossils, this snapshot can easily be biased in favour of particular places and times appearing to be more important to the evolutionary process than they were in reality. There are fossil hotspots because those places favoured fossilisation, not because more of the species were concentrated there or because something about that place influenced the evolution of the species.

Refuting Creationism - A strange Sea Slug - From 500 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Dorsal view of a complete Shishania aculeata

Image credit: G Zhang/L Parry.

Spines covering the body of Shishania aculeata

Image credit: G Zhang/L Parry

August: Mollusc discovery | News and features | University of Bristol

Palaeontology has a habit of throwing up surprises.

Sadly for creationists, these surprises never show us that science is fundamentally wrong and creationism is fundamentally right. It invariably shows us exactly the opposite.

The surprise today is that an early mollusc resembled a slug with a spiky armour, not the smooth shell we normally associate with snails which were believed to have evolved in the Early Cambrian when this species lived.

The confirmation that creationism is fundamentally wrong comes from the fact that this strange slug lived in that very long pre-'Creation' period of Earth history, 500 million years before creationists think the Universe was magicked up out of nothing by some magic words spoken in a language that no-one else spoke because, so the story goes, there was no-one else for the magician to speak to.

The mollusc, named Shishania aculeata, was probably an early evolutionary dead-end; an early response to the threat to soft-bodies creatures from the emerging predators that gave the impetus for the rapid radiation of forms that characterised the Cambrian.

Refuting Creationism - The Mammoths Of Vancouver Island - Between 11,000 and 37,500 Or More Years Before 'Creation Week'

When mammoths roamed Vancouver Island: SFU and Royal BC Museum delve into beasts’ history in our region - SFU News - Simon Fraser University

There are no elephants in the Bible.

This news often comes as a shock to creationists brought up with fanciful drawings of pairs of animals walking up the gangplank onto a wooden boat in the childish tale of Noah and his Ark. Why? Weren't there a pair of elephants, as large as life, along with zebras, rhinos, hippos and penguins, according to the Bible?

Hmmm... LOL!

Well, no there weren't, for the simple reason that there is nothing in the Bible that wasn't known to the people who wrote the tale. Nothing outside a day or two's walk from the Canaanite Hills where they herded their goats and built their mud-brick dwellings, like any other Middle Eastern Bronze Age pastoralists.

And of course, although creationists will insist that the Bible records dinosaurs roaming the countryside at the time the tale was set, if you change the meanings of a few words, not only are elephants not mentioned, but nor are their ancient ancestors, the mammoths. And nor are continents like North and South America, Australia, Antarctica and of course islands like Vancouver, Greenland, Madagascar, Great Britain and Ireland were entirely unknown and unsuspected by the Bible's imaginative authors.

Which is why they imagined setting the beginnings of it all just a few thousand years earlier, made perfect sense. The entire history of Earth and life on it was as unknown to them as its geography and geology. These were simple people who lived on a flat, magical planet with a dome over it and who didn't know where the sun went at night, or that rain formed in clouds.

So how could they possibly have known about mammoths living on Vancouver Island in North America? It wasn't their fault that they were so poorly educated; they were probably about as well educated as any other Middle Eastern pastoralist of the Bronze Age - i.e., not very well at all, being illiterate and innumerate. The people who've let them down are the later cult leaders who collected their tales, bound them up in a book and decreed it to be the inerrant word of an omniscient god.

Weirdly, there are people alive today, in modern, technologically advanced countries, who believe what those ignorant goat-herders wrote has never been equaled, let alone bettered, by modern science, for its completeness, reliability and accuracy.

But there were mammoths living on Vancouver Island between 13,000 years and at least 35,000 years before the Bronze Age authors of the Bible set their creation myth to try to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding with narratives that made sense within their narrow framework of understanding, and this is how any rational person can tell the claims that the Bible was written of inspired by an omniscient creator god is nonsense - a dishonest fiction intended to deceive - false witnessing on a grand scale.

The evidence of these mammoths has just been published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences and explained in a press release from Simon Fraser University. The authors examined 32 suspected mammoth samples from Vancouver Island, of which 16 proved suitable for carbon dating. One of the samples proved to be beyond the age at which ¹⁴C dating gives accurate results (45,000 years) so we only know that there were mammoths on Vancouver Island before 47,500 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - How Worms Turned - Into Insects

Fig. 1: Anatomical overview of Youti yuanshi.

Ancient worm fossil solves mystery of how insects and spiders evolved - Durham University

To anyone who has ever looked at the segmented body of an annelid worm and the segmented body of an insect, particularly in its larval stage, that the latter is really the former with legs and (usually as an adult) wings should be obvious. The same can be said for annelid worms and centipedes and, for that matter, worms with legs and arachnids (spiders, scorpions and mites). But maybe the connection between arachnids and crabs or insects and barnacles is not so obvious, until you look at how the legs work and how they both have an exoskeleton instead of an endoskeleton like the vertebrates.

But then even the primitive ancestors of the vertebrates were segmented like the annelids, as we can see in the spinal column and the way nerves arise from the spinal cord.

But, tell a creationist that a segmented worm evolved into the arthropods, and they'll immediately demand to see the 'transitional' fossil, that they've been fooled into thinking must exist because every generation of every species is obliged to leave a fossil so there is a complete, unbroken record of evolution somewhere, because the Theory of Evolution says so. In fact, a complete, unbroken fossil record of every generation of an evolving species over time would look suspiciously like something other than chance was at work in creating fossils.

So, what we have are the snapshots at random points in time that are left in the geological column, and various dating methods that tell us how old the fossil is. The rest is simple common sense and joining the dots.

And one such snapshot has just been announced by researchers working at Durham University, UK, who have identified a species that is clearly partway between a segmented worm and an early arthropod (euarthropod). The newly-named Youti yuanshi is about the size of a poppy seed and fits neatly into one of creationism's beloved gaps. And, of course, it is exactly what the TOE predicts should have lived, because, as I said, the connection between segmented worms and segmented arthropods is obvious.

Refuting Creationism - The Bible Is Nonsense - So 42 Million-Year-Old Amber Tells Us

Spider attacking a wasp. Myanmar
(100 million years old)

Image credit: Dr. George Poinar Jr.
Earth Archives

Rare parasitic wasp.

Maria Blake

Australian amber has revealed ‘living fossils’ traced back to Gondwana 42 million years ago

Amber is especially good for preserving in exquisite details, small arthropods which don't fossilise well in rocks, like larger vertebrates with hard body parts, and we can be confident that the age of the fossil is the age of the amber in which it is preserved.

Some years ago, on holiday in Kassandria, Greece, I came across a small group of Mediterranean pines that were being use to collect the resin used to flavour the local wine, Retsina. This wine is something of an acquired taste but is best drunk chilled, with Greek food, on a warm summer evening at sunset, overlooking the Aegean - and probably after a bottle or two of Demestica.

The fascinating thing was how many ants had managed to get themselves trapped in the resin in the plastic containers it was draining into from the cuts in the tree bark.

There were so many that I can only assume that when ancient amber was being produced there were either fewer ants or less resin.

So, what can we tell from the fossils preserved in amber?

Partly from their occurrence in amber, we know that some 85% of all living species were arthropods, rather than the 0.3% of species that were the much more noticeable vertebrates. We can also tell where and when major orders evolved and how long some of them have existed for. Since amber is formed from tree resin, it follows that it only occurred after trees evolved and from the resin produced by specific species of tree in areas where these trees grew.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution By Hybridization May Be Commonplace in Plants

DR Lionel Di Santo samples black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa in the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest.

Credit: Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The team found the black cottonwood-balsam poplar stable hybrid lineage after analyzing the genetic makeup of 546 poplar tree cuttings collected along seven transects ranging from Alaska to Wyoming, with collections in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, in between.

Credit: Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Discovery of a hybrid lineage offers clues to how trees adapt to climate change | Penn State University

Despite creationist dogma that say otherwise, evolution in a population can occur hybridization, especially in plants, where it may be commonplace. Two related plants hybridize and the resulting offspring acquires additional genes which extend its capabilities, enabling it to survive environmental change or move into new niches, and forming a stable population with new allele frequencies.

And as though to rub salt into creationist wounds, some of these happened hundreds of thousands of years before creationism's legendary 'Creation Week', before which, on the say-so of some ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists who were unaware of anything more than a day or two's walk from the Canaanite Hills, creationists think there was once nothing out of which everything was created by some magic words, just a few thousand years ago.

They also hold the diametrically opposite views simultaneously, that evolution is impossible because the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic] forbids it, and that evolution occurred as a massively accelerated rate in the last few thousand years, unnoticed by anyone, in which several whole new species arose in a single generation by magic.

Now a team led by Penn State University paleobotanists led by Associate Professor Jill Hamilton, from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, have shown that a hybrid between black cottonwood, or Populus trichocarpa, and balsam poplar, Populus balsamifera, was able to move out of the wet coastal region to which most black cottonwood trees are restricted, into the arid lands to the east. This movement started about 800,000 years ago.