Creationism in Crisis - Hunting for Earth’s First Complex Life

The bird cliff Stappen, southern Bjørnøya (Bear Island) in the Barents Sea. The island is part of Svalbard, Norway.

Michael Haferkamp,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Microfossils from a sediment core of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), Sediment sample with microfossils

Hannes Grobe (talk), Alfred Wegener Institute,
CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On The Hunt For Earth’s First Complex Life - Universe Today

For most of its history, Earth was not a planet of trees, animals, fungi or anything else visible without a microscope. It was a microbial world. Life had existed for well over a billion years before the first clearly recognisable eukaryotic cells appeared in the fossil record, and for roughly another billion years after that, complex life remained comparatively inconspicuous.

That immense, slowly unfolding history is the subject of On the Hunt for Earth’s First Complex Life, an article in Universe Today by science journalist Bruce Dorminey, based on an interview with University of Oxford palaeontologist Associate Professor Ross Anderson. Anderson studies some of the most elusive fossils on Earth: the microscopic and usually soft-bodied remains of the organisms that preceded animals, plants and fungi.

The article is not a report of one new research paper, but an overview of an active field of research. Fortunately, several peer-reviewed studies provide the scientific background to Anderson’s comments. Together they describe not a sudden act of creation, but a long evolutionary transition from a biosphere dominated by bacteria and archaea to one containing eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms and, eventually, animals.

From a Microbial World to Complex Life. For most of Earth’s approximately 4.54-billion-year history, life was microscopic. The dates below represent the oldest reasonably secure evidence currently known, not necessarily the moment at which each evolutionary innovation first appeared. Any organism must have evolved before it could leave a fossil, and the earliest members of a lineage may have gone unpreserved or remain undiscovered.

Some major milestones

• About 4.54 billion years ago — Earth formed. The young planet initially experienced intense volcanism, impacts and chemical evolution before stable oceans and environments capable of supporting life developed.
• More than 3.5 billion years ago — microbial life was established. Ancient rocks preserve chemical and structural evidence of organisms that lacked nuclei and other membrane-bound organelles. Some proposed evidence is older, but its biological origin remains disputed.
• By about 2.7–2.3 billion years ago — oxygenic photosynthesis had evolved. Cyanobacteria began using sunlight to extract electrons from water, releasing oxygen as a by-product.
• About 2.4 billion years ago — the Great Oxidation Event. Oxygen began accumulating persistently in the atmosphere. This did not immediately produce complex life, but it profoundly altered ocean chemistry, mineral formation and the evolutionary opportunities available to organisms.
• At least 1.75 billion years ago — recognisable eukaryotes. Organic-walled microfossils from northern Australia are among the oldest well-supported fossil eukaryotes. Their distribution indicates that they lived on or within oxygenated seabeds and probably already possessed mitochondria.
• By about 1 billion years ago — multicellular eukaryotes. The fossil record contains increasingly persuasive examples of multicellular algae and other organisms in which cells were joined and organised. Multicellularity subsequently evolved independently in several eukaryotic lineages.
• About 791 million years ago — diverse eukaryotes in the Svalbard sea. The Svanbergfjellet Formation preserves green algae and several enigmatic organisms with complex multicellular forms.
• About 720–635 million years ago — Cryogenian global glaciations. During the “Snowball Earth” episodes, ice extended into tropical latitudes. The resulting environmental disruption probably caused extinctions while also creating new ecological opportunities after the ice retreated.
• By about 574 million years ago — macroscopic Ediacaran organisms. Large, soft-bodied organisms appeared in marine ecosystems. Some may have been early animals, although the precise affinities of several famous Ediacaran forms remain debated.
• From about 539 million years ago — the Cambrian radiation. Animal diversity, movement, burrowing, predation and biomineralisation expanded dramatically over millions of years. Skeletons and shells also made organisms much more likely to enter the fossil record.

How do scientists recognise a fossil eukaryote?

Finding a microscopic structure in an ancient rock does not automatically establish that it was alive, still less that it was a eukaryote. Palaeontologists first determine whether the object is genuinely biological, whether it was deposited with the surrounding sediment and whether it is as old as the rock containing it. They then examine combinations of features that are difficult to explain as mineral growths, later contamination or ordinary bacterial cells.

• Size: Many early eukaryotic fossils are more than 100 micrometres across, considerably larger than typical bacteria. Size alone is not decisive, however, because some bacteria also produce exceptionally large cells.
• Complex walls: Multiple wall layers, regularly arranged spines, sculptured surfaces and other elaborate structures indicate a degree of cellular control associated with eukaryotes.
• Controlled openings: Some fossils have deliberately formed openings through which a cell apparently emerged from a resistant cyst. Their regular shape and position distinguish them from accidental tears or decay.
• Internal structures: Preserved internal bodies, membranes or consistent patterns of cell division can support a eukaryotic interpretation, although claims that a particular structure represents a nucleus or organelle require especially strong evidence.
• Multicellular organisation: Regular arrangements of connected cells, branching, differentiated regions or structures resembling holdfasts can demonstrate controlled growth rather than a chance aggregation of microorganisms.
• Organic chemistry: Microscopy and spectroscopic techniques can establish that a fossil has a carbon-rich biological wall and reveal how heat, pressure and mineral reactions altered it after burial.
• Geological context: Sedimentology and geochemistry reveal whether the organism lived in a coastal lagoon, on an oxygenated seabed or in deeper anoxic water. Finding the same form repeatedly within an appropriate environment strengthens its biological interpretation.

No single characteristic is necessarily conclusive. Large cells can be prokaryotic, mineral crystals can imitate biological shapes and geological alteration can create misleading structures. The strongest identifications therefore combine morphology, chemistry, repeated occurrence and environmental context.

Even when a fossil can confidently be identified as eukaryotic, its precise relationship to modern organisms may remain uncertain. Many organic-walled microfossils are consequently described by form rather than assigned prematurely to animals, plants, fungi or a particular group of protists. This caution is a strength of palaeontology, not a weakness: conclusions are calibrated to the evidence available and revised when better specimens or analytical techniques become available.

Further information: Susannah M. Porter, “Insights into eukaryogenesis from the fossil record”; Ross P. Anderson and colleagues, “Proterozoic microfossils continue to provide new insights into the rise of complex eukaryotic life”.

For creationists, the timescale alone is fatal. The rocks being examined are hundreds of millions to more than a billion years older than the entire Universe is supposed to be according to a literal reading of Genesis. More importantly, they preserve an ordered history of biological and environmental change that bears no resemblance to a six-day creation followed by a recent global flood.

The cellular innovation behind complex life

A eukaryotic cell is fundamentally more internally organised than a bacterial or archaeal cell. Its DNA is enclosed within a nucleus, while specialised compartments called organelles perform particular functions. Among the most important of these are mitochondria, which use oxygen to release energy from food and make energy-intensive forms of cellular organisation possible.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Digging Pits In Bolivia - 67 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Oblique view of the lower part of the surface from the east, showing the general extent of the exposed palaeosurface. People for scale. Red arrow indicates the pit.

From: Meyer CA, Heymann JH, Ibarra EC, Flores EL, Sciscio L (2026)

Artistic reconstruction of the Mullurina Mayu bowl-shaped depression during the Late Cretaceous, depicting the probable tracemakers responsible for the Calorckosauripus trackways and possibly the bowl-shaped depression.

Illustration by Joshua Knüppe.

A Cretaceous Cold Case: The mysterious affair at Mullurina Mayu (Bolivia) | Blog

Some 67 million years before creationists believe their god created Earth during its mythical six-day “Creation Week”, a group of enormous, long-necked dinosaurs walked across the soft mud beside a river or lake in what is now Bolivia. At least one large animal may also have stopped to scrape repeatedly at the ground, leaving a great bowl-shaped depression surrounded by grooves and possible claw marks. Whether it was preparing a nest, digging for water or mineral salts, or doing something else entirely is uncertain, but the marks it left behind provide a rare glimpse of dinosaur behaviour shortly before the end of the Cretaceous Period.

The evidence comes from the Mullurina Mayu locality in the Maragua region, about 23 kilometres west of Sucre, Bolivia. There, an exposed surface of Maastrichtian-age claystone in the Lower Member of the El Molino Formation preserves several trackways attributed to titanosaurian sauropods. The tracks have been assigned to the trace-fossil species Calorckosauripus lazari, believed to have been made by comparatively non-derived titanosaurs.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Fossil Record, Christian A. Meyer, Jose Hugo Heymann, Edwin Chuca Ibarra, Eddy Laura Flores and Lara Sciscio have described an unusual structure preserved among those trackways. It is an irregular, bowl-shaped hollow measuring approximately 4.2 by 3.2 metres and reaching about 60 centimetres in depth. Around its walls are bundles of parallel grooves, roughly one centimetre wide and up to about 30 centimetres long, together with broader marks on the floor that may have been made by claws.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Covered In Cambrian Coprolite.

It never rains but it poos

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Life Without Poop

Life With Poop

T Klarenbeek, CC BY-SA

Surprising new theory for leap in evolution – News

It is not often that fossilised faeces take centre stage in an explanation of one of the most important episodes in evolutionary history. However, a review published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution suggests that the evolution of digestive systems—and the resulting production of faecal pellets—may have helped to transform the chemistry and ecology of the oceans during the Cambrian radiation.

In The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation, palaeontologists Julien Kimmig and Russell D.C. Bicknell bring together evidence from fossil digestive systems and coprolites—fossilised faeces—from more than 35 deposits around the world. They found that coprolites became progressively more abundant and varied during the Cambrian Period, ranging from microscopic pellets to centimetre-sized masses containing shells and fragments of other animals.

This change coincided with the evolution of increasingly sophisticated digestive systems. Early animals with blind guts had only one opening through which food entered and waste was expelled. The evolution of a through-gut, with a separate mouth and anus, permitted food to move continuously through the body. Animals could feed more frequently, process a greater variety of foods and adopt new ecological roles. Early arthropods, in particular, developed specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of extracting nutrients from increasingly diverse prey.

According to the authors, the consequences extended far beyond the animals producing the waste. Faecal pellets packaged organic matter and nutrients—including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron—and transported them through the water column and into deeper environments. In modern oceans, this sinking material forms an important part of the biological pump that carries carbon and nutrients away from surface waters. Kimmig and Bicknell propose that the beginnings of a comparable process during the Cambrian helped to fertilise previously nutrient-poor environments and support more complex food webs.

How Evolution Works - Shell Shock For Creationists

Steinkern (internal mould) of Maclurites neritoides containing cryptic fauna cornulitids, bryozoans, and graptolites (arrows).

Credit: Vinn, O., Wilson, M.A., Tinn, O. et al. (2026)

Empty seashells became new habitats 470 million years ago | University of Tartu

A paper just published in Scientific Reports by an international team led by Olev Vinn of the University of Tartu, Estonia, provides a lovely illustration of the opportunistic nature of evolution.

Some 470 million years ago — almost 470 million years before creationists’ mythical ‘Creation Week’ — a seemingly modest ecological innovation occurred in the oceans: animals began using the sheltered interiors of empty mollusc shells as habitats. This happened during the Middle Ordovician, following the Cambrian radiation, and helped to establish a new ecological niche that remains important in marine ecosystems today.

Creationists like to misrepresent the Cambrian radiation as the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animals without ancestors. In reality, it was neither instantaneous nor without an evolutionary prehistory. It unfolded over tens of millions of years and grew out of changes already under way among the preceding Ediacaran biota, including increasing mobility, burrowing and ecological interaction.

As animals became more mobile, predation intensified and defensive structures became increasingly advantageous. Mineralised skeletons and shells evolved independently in several lineages, probably under several interacting pressures, including protection, structural support and changing ocean chemistry. Molluscs were among the groups that acquired shells, and their subsequent diversification produced such familiar forms as gastropods, bivalves and shelled cephalopods.

One consequence was the growing accumulation of empty shells on the seabed. Each dead mollusc left behind a hard surface and a sheltered cavity that other organisms could potentially exploit. Yet the researchers found that, throughout the Cambrian, the interiors of mollusc shells and other skeletal remains remained free of encrusting animals, even though organisms capable of living on surfaces inside other cavities already existed.

That changed during the Middle Ordovician, when attached animals began colonising the relatively large, spacious shells of nautiloid cephalopods. They later spread into the empty shells of gastropods and bivalves. No foresight or planning was required: once organisms capable of settling inside these shells gained access to a protected surface supplied with food-bearing water, any heritable tendency that improved their ability to exploit it could be favoured by natural selection.

Refuting Creationism - A Reptile That Looks Like A Cross Between a Greyhound And A Crocodile - From 215 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Galahadosuchus jonesi n. gen. n. sp. The morphology of regions of the body that are not currently known for Galahadosuchus jonesi (i.e., not preserved in NHMUK PV R 10002) is inferred from comparison with Terrestrisuchus gracilis (Spiekman et al., 2023, 2024) due to the high degree of morphological similarity between these two taxa. Scale bar represents 100 mm.

Artwork by M. Dempsey.

New species of ancient crocodile named in honour of Welsh school teacher | Natural History Museum

A newly named, 215-million-year-old species of crocodile-like reptile, discovered in Gloucestershire, UK, and described in The Anatomical Record, looks rather like the sort of creature creationists imagine a transitional fossil should be: half of one modern species and half of another from an unrelated group. That, of course, is the ridiculous parody of evolution that the creationist cult teaches its followers to believe is what those crazy scientists think the Theory of Evolution describes.

In reality, this discovery is nothing of the sort. What it actually reveals is a species that raises interesting questions about the environmental pressures that shaped its evolution. It was a long-legged, fast-running crocodylomorph, resembling a greyhound with scales and a crocodile’s head and jaws. It probably lived its entire life on land, using its speed to hunt small animals. That, in turn, suggests its prey were also fast-moving, rather like the relationship between cheetahs and gazelles, which have co-evolved speed in an evolutionary arms race: one to catch fast prey, the other to escape a fast predator. It is exactly the sort of process that refutes the notion of intelligent design, yet is entirely predictable under the Theory of Evolution by natural selection.

This animal lived in what was then an area of high ground overlooking hot, arid plains during the Late Triassic. That was a period of major diversification, brought to an end by a mass extinction caused by intense volcanic activity. It was followed by the Jurassic, so comparing animals from before and after that extinction event can help us understand how life responded to those dramatic environmental changes. Among the creatures that survived were the ancestors of the dinosaurs, and later, birds and mammals.

The research team, led by PhD student Ewart H. Bodenham of University College London, with colleagues from UCL, the Natural History Museum, London, and the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany, carried out a detailed analysis of this and other fossils from fissure deposits on either side of the Bristol Channel, in South Wales and South-West England. They concluded that this specimen represented a species new to science.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Our Ancestral Fish

Illustration of the Paleolophus swimming in ancient Asian seas.

Credit: Dr Brian Choo (Flinders University)

New pieces link fish puzzle – News

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Another of Those 'Non-Existant' Missing LInks - 90 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Alnashetri cerropoliciensis based on a reconstruction by Gabriel Díaz Yantén, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro

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Alnashetri cerropoliciensis

Illustration provided by Gabriel Díaz Yantén
Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

Analysis of 90-million-year-old fossil rewrites history | University of Minnesota

Many creationists believe the Theory of Evolution is primarily about fossils and that it predicts every stage in the evolution of a species should be present in the fossil record. From this misunderstanding comes the claim that any “missing link” falsifies the entire theory. The fact that palaeontologists have discovered yet another of those supposed “missing links” will therefore cause another bout of cognitive dissonance between what reality shows and what creationists insist reality ought to look like.

Creationists also traditionally deny that dinosaurs are evidence of an ancient Earth and of a mass extinction event 66 million years ago. Instead, they claim dinosaur fossils are normally found in sedimentary rocks because they were killed and buried during the Biblical Flood. This specimen, however, was rapidly buried and preserved by an advancing sand dune — something that is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a catastrophic global flood.

Its discovery was announced in a paper in Nature by a team co-led by University of Minnesota researcher Peter Makovicky and Argentinian colleague Sebastián Apesteguía. The paper describes the discovery of the complete skeleton of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a 90-million-year-old small dinosaur that fills an important gap in our understanding of where this group of dinosaurs originated and how they spread across the world.

Alnashetri belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as the alvarezsaurids, later members of which were characterised by their short, stubby arms and small teeth. Alnashetri, however, had longer arms and larger teeth, yet it was one of the smallest adult dinosaurs ever found in South America, weighing only about 4 pounds (around 2 kg). These primitive features and its small size show that the group became small before evolving their characteristic reduced arms and teeth. At 90 million years old, the fossil also suggests that the group originated on the supercontinent Pangaea before it fully fragmented, meaning their later global distribution reflects continental drift rather than migration across oceans.

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.

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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.

Creationism in Crisis - An Early Relative of the First Primates From North America - 65.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Purgatorius

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Artists impression of Purgatorius unio from Late Paleocene North America

By Nobu Tamura - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Miniscule fossil discovery reveals fresh clues into the evolution of the earliest-known relative of all primates - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

Scientists have recently announced the discovery of a small tooth in the Corral Bluffs, in the Denver basin, Colorado that shows one of the group of early mammals from which primates later emerged probably evolved in North America. For Creationists keen to find a reason to dismiss science and the evidence it keeps revealing showing creationism is nothing but an evidence free superstition, this is eerily reminiscent of what they regard as the 'Nebraska Man' hoax.

The supposed hoax was nothing of the sort and was, in reality a creationists lie intended to mislead people, perpetrated by two evangelical Christian con-men, Hank Hanegraff and Grant Jeffrey, who falsely proclaimed it to have been a failed attempt to trick people into believing in evolution - a trick that still has some success on creationists, notorious as they are for failing to fact-check their claims.

Creationists like to pretend that palaeontology is little more than a catalogue of embarrassing mistakes and hoaxes. In reality, of course, the history of palaeontology shows the opposite: new discoveries steadily refine and improve our understanding of life’s history, filling gaps in the fossil record and clarifying evolutionary relationships. A recent discovery reported in a press release by Taylor & Francis and described in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is a good example of this process at work.

The discovery concerns a few minuscule fossil teeth belonging to Purgatorius, a tiny, shrew-sized mammal that lived about 65.9 million years ago, shortly after the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Purgatorius is widely regarded as one of the earliest known relatives of the primate lineage—the group that eventually gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. Fossils of this animal were previously known mainly from Montana and parts of western Canada, but the new finds from the Denver Basin in Colorado extend its known range several hundred miles further south.

According to the researchers, this discovery helps fill an awkward gap in the early fossil record of primate relatives. Slightly younger species appear in the southwestern United States about two million years later, leaving palaeontologists wondering why earlier forms seemed confined to the north. The Colorado fossils suggest that these early primate relatives probably spread southwards fairly rapidly after the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous Period, diversifying as forests recovered in the aftermath of the impact.

However, before creationists begin sharpening their pencils in preparation for another round of “Nebraska Man” rhetoric, it is important to understand what this discovery does—and does not—show. The paper is not claiming that primates themselves evolved in North America, nor that this tiny mammal was a direct ancestor of humans. Purgatorius is better described as a stem relative of primates—an early member of the broader evolutionary group from which primates eventually emerged. In other words, it sits near the base of the evolutionary tree leading to primates, not within the modern primate group itself.

What the discovery really demonstrates is something far more typical of evolutionary biology: as new fossils are found, the geographical distribution and timing of early evolutionary lineages become clearer. In this case, a few teeth barely larger than grains of rice are helping palaeontologists reconstruct how the earliest primate relatives spread across ancient North America in the chaotic ecological world that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - Why There Are No fossils Of The Early Sponges From 650 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Sponges in the Ediacaran

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A giant barrel sponge from Indonesia. Sponges were the first reef builders and maintain a fundamental role in modern marine ecosystems.

January: Bristol scientists discover early sponges were soft | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists have a massive gap to try to close; a gap so wide it makes the Grand Canyon look like a mere ditch. It is the gap between the earliest signs of life in the fossil record and the timeline a literal reading of the Bible allows. And that gap just got a lot wider.

Creationists could once take comfort from the fact that there was little solid fossil evidence of multicellular life much before the Cambrian, when organisms with hard body parts that fossilise begin to appear in the record. That gap was closed, not by fossils as we normally understand the term, but by chemical fossils contained in ancient rocks, as I explained in my last blog post. This evidence, together with genetic evidence from other work, shows that the common ancestors of multicellular animal life were very probably sea sponges.

But to a creationist, conditioned to believe that the Theory of Evolution is a theory about fossils—so that any gaps in the fossil record must be fatal for the theory—there is still some comfort in the fact that whatever left these chemical fingerprints in ancient rocks left no tangible fossils.

Now a team of palaeontologists, led by the University of Bristol, have shown that the lack of fossil evidence of these ancestral sponges has a simple explanation: they were soft-bodied, having yet to evolve the characteristic skeletons composed of millions of microscopic glass-like spicules. These did not evolve until about 560 million years ago. The team have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The Bristol-led team have now pushed back the evolution of these soft-bodied sponges to between 615 and 600 million years ago by using a combination of genetic evidence from 133 protein-coding genes and fossil evidence. This approach also showed that the spicules evolved independently in different sponge groups by convergent evolution.

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

A Shoreline scene in the Carboniferous

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A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern.

Illustration by Hannah Fredd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - How The Fossil Record Tracks Climate Change

Tata Aka (CC BY 2.0)
via Wikimedia Commons

The climate in Catalonia was much rainier 10 million years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

A paper published a few days ago in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution describes how the climate in Catalonia was much wetter 10 million years ago than it is today, with rainfall roughly twice the present rate, and how this was reflected in the evolution of mammals in the region. The study was conducted by palaeontologists at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP-CERCA), in association with colleagues from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

This must be deeply frustrating for creationists because, no matter how much they ignore the evidence, misrepresent it, or shout abuse at scientists, the evidence stubbornly refuses to support creationism and invariably supports evolution over deep time on an ancient Earth. The findings presented in this paper are, of course, no exception.

Scientists have previously established a close link between rainfall and the composition of mammalian communities, with wetter conditions favouring insectivores. Increased rainfall promotes the development of forests, which in turn provide abundant niches for insects and other invertebrates—the primary food source of insectivorous mammals. This relationship between small mammals and climate was first studied in detail by Jan van Dam, an associate researcher at the ICP. Van Dam developed equations that allow both average annual rainfall and its seasonal distribution to be estimated from fossil assemblages of small mammals.

Building on that earlier work, the present study analyses the abundant fossil record of small mammals to reconstruct populations that changed dynamically through time in response to shifting climatic conditions—exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. There is, unsurprisingly, no evidence of spontaneous creation of species, nor of a global biological reset caused by a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste Of Baby Dinosaurs as Food - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ecosystem reconstruction of the Late Jurassic Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry around 150 million years ago in Colorado, the United States

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas

Life in Late Jurassic Colorado.

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Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

The prolific-waste reproductive strategy of Late Jurassic dinosaurs has been highlighted in a paper published in a New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Cassius Morrison of University College London’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The team constructed a detailed food web using fossil data laid down around 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation of the United States. The Morrison Formation is a prominent sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (approximately 156–147 million years old) spanning around 1.5 million square kilometres across the western United States. It is North America’s most prolific source of dinosaur fossils, preserving vast deposits of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone formed in ancient river systems and floodplains.

Their analysis revealed that a major food source for carnivorous dinosaurs consisted of the young of the largest herbivores. These animals followed a reproductive strategy in which large numbers of offspring were produced and then effectively abandoned after hatching. Such juveniles would have been abundant, vulnerable, and easy prey for predators. This strategy is a familiar one in biology and only makes sense as the outcome of evolutionary processes. As an intelligently designed reproductive strategy, however, it is difficult to make sense of at all.

This is yet another example of the prolific waste that characterises living systems and betrays the absence of intelligent foresight in their design. Prolific waste and unnecessary complexity are hallmarks of evolution, whereas minimal waste and minimal complexity are the defining features of genuinely intelligent design — a distinction I explore in detail in my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

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

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

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

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

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

How Science Works - Why Did The Woolly Rhino Go Extinct 4,000 Years Before Creation Week?

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis
Grotte Chauvet, Ardèche, France

Source

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis

By Mr Langlois10 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.

Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.

Creationism Refuted - Earth - A Planet Fine-Tuned For Extinction

© Kaori Serakaki (OIST)

Illustrations of Ordovician, jawless vertebrates. Left is a Promissum conodont, ranging from 5 to 50 cm in length and named after unusual, cone-like teeth fossils, which are hypothesized to be ancestors of modern lampreys and hagfishes. On the right is a pair of Sacabambaspis, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. Very few conodont species survived the Late Ordovician Extinction Event, and no fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the event have been discovered.

© Nobu Tamura (CC BY-SA)

The Age of Fishes began with mass death | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology OIST

A recent paper published in Science Advances by Wahei Hagiwara and Professor Lauren Sallan of the Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, closes a long-standing gap in our understanding of the early radiation of vertebrates into jawed and jawless fishes following the Late Ordovician mass extinction, around ~445–443 million years ago. Their analysis shows that this radiation arose from a small number of fortunate survivors clinging on in ecological refugia. From those few lineages, of course, all modern marine and terrestrial vertebrates ultimately evolved.

This study neatly dismantles one of creationism’s favourite rhetorical fallbacks: the claim that Earth was deliberately “fine-tuned” to support complex life, and ultimately humans. The evolutionary pattern revealed here—near-annihilation followed by recovery from a few scattered refugia—is not the signature of foresight or optimisation, but of contingency and survival against the odds. Life does not flourish because conditions are perfectly arranged for it; rather, whatever happens to survive is forced to adapt to whatever conditions remain. The history of vertebrates, like that of life more generally, is therefore not one of careful planning, but of repeated catastrophe followed by opportunistic evolutionary radiation.

Creationists are notable for clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, childishly mistaking stubbornness for intellectual strength, rather like a spoilt toddler refusing to accept that they have just lost a game of Snap!. Alongside the patently absurd claim that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old sits the almost equally untenable belief that the planet was created exactly as it is, perfectly suited for human life. This notion is maintained despite abundant evidence for repeated mass extinctions driven by cosmic impacts, large-scale geological processes such as plate tectonics and associated seismic activity, major reorganisations of ocean circulation, and delicately balanced biogeochemical feedback systems involving oxygenation and carbon cycling that periodically spiral out of control, triggering catastrophic climate change.

What the evidence actually reveals is not a cosy, well-regulated world resembling some tranquil small town in Kansas, but a planet that is frequently so hostile to life that much of it is wiped out entirely. Most species go extinct, leaving only a handful of survivors to inherit the aftermath and radiate into new forms adapted to altered conditions—until they too are eliminated by some future catastrophe. The conclusion is unavoidable: Earth is not fine-tuned for human life, or for life in general. Instead, today’s species are the fortunate descendants of a few lucky survivors, shaped by natural selection to fit available ecological niches as neatly as a hand fits a glove.

Creationism Refuted - Reconstructing Ancient Ecosystems From Molecules Trapped in Fossils

Fossilized elephant dentine (scale: 1.5 mm across), with rock seen in the lower right and dentine in the upper left. The white dentine is intact collagen.

Credit: Timothy Bromage and Bin Hu,
NYU Dentistry

Metabolic Analyses of Animal Fossils Helps Scientists Reconstruct Million-Year-Old Environments

The bad news for creationism continues unabated. Scientists led by Professor Timothy G. Bromage of the Department of Molecular Pathobiology at New York University College of Dentistry have developed a technique that opens an entirely new window onto the deep past. By analysing metabolites preserved in fossilised bones, the researchers are able to extract detailed biological and environmental information from animals that lived between 1.3 and 3 million years ago.

The team have published their findings in Nature, describing a method that pushes palaeobiology well beyond traditional morphology-based reconstruction.

The significance of this technique lies in its ability to reconstruct ancient environments with remarkable precision. From the chemical signatures locked within fossil bone, researchers can infer temperature, soil conditions, rainfall patterns, vegetation, and even the presence of parasites. The resulting picture is one of ecosystems changing over time, with animals adapting in step with shifting environments — exactly what evolutionary theory predicts, and wholly incompatible with the childish notion of magical creation a few thousand years ago or a recent biological reset caused by a genocidal flood.

Creationism Refuted - Highly Accurate Dating of Dinosaur Eggs

The Gobi Desert, where many dinosaur eggs have been found.

Dinosaur eggshells unlock a new way to tell time in the fossil record | Stellenbosch University

This paper will have creationists searching for reasons to dismiss evidence that would, if they were prepared to accept it honestly, force them to concede that their beliefs are wrong. It reports a discovery by researchers at Stellenbosch University showing that dinosaur eggshells can be dated with a high degree of precision using an already well-established technique: uranium–lead (U–Pb) radiometric dating.

Until now, U–Pb dating has been most famously applied to zircon crystals in volcanic ash, where the age can be determined by measuring the ratio of radioactive uranium isotopes to the stable lead isotopes produced by their decay. In this study, however, the same underlying principles are applied to calcite crystals preserved in dinosaur eggshells.

The scientists have published their method, open access, in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Creationism Refuted - A Massive Evolutionary Arms Race 130 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life in the Paja ecosystem

AI-generate image (ChatGPT5.2)

Illustration of some of the apex predators in the Paja Formation biota with a human for scale.

Image by Artwork by Guillermo Torres, Hace Tiempo, Instituto von Humboldt.

Apex predators in prehistoric Colombian oceans would have snacked on killer whales today: McGill study | Newsroom - McGill University

Two researchers at McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada, have uncovered evidence of an ecosystem teeming with giant marine predators some 130 million years ago. The largest of these predators could, quite literally, have eaten something the size of a modern orca as little more than a snack. This will make depressing reading for creationists, not only because it all happened deep in the long pre-“Creation Week” history of life on Earth, but because the evolutionary arms races that led to these giants are precisely what the theory of evolution by natural selection predicts.

The two researchers, Dirley Cortés and Professor Hans C. E. Larsson, have just published their findings, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

It doesn’t get any easier for creationists. Just because it’s Christmas week doesn’t mean the awkward facts are going to go away, or that scientists are going to stop uncovering more of them. No matter what they post on social media; no matter how loudly they shout; or how fervently they gather on Sundays to collectively drown out their doubts, Santa is not going to deliver evidence that the Bronze Age creation myths in the Bible contain even a grain of historical truth. The problem is that truth remains true whether a creationist believes it or not, and regardless of whether their parents believed it. No amount of looking the other way or pretending the facts aren’t there will ever change that.

The palaeontologists reached their conclusions by reconstructing an ecosystem network for all known animal fossils from the Paja Formation in central Colombia. They used body sizes, feeding adaptations, and comparisons with modern animals, and then validated the results against one of the most detailed present-day marine ecosystem networks available: the living Caribbean ecosystem, which they used as a reference. The Paja ecosystem thrived with plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and abundant invertebrates, giving rise to one of the most intricate marine food webs known. This complexity emerged as sea levels rose and Earth’s climate warmed during the Mesozoic era, including the Cretaceous, triggering an explosion of marine biodiversity.

How Science Work - (And Why Creationism Fails) - Changing Our Minds When the Evidence Changes

Life reconstruction of Wadisuchus kassabi in Late Cretaceous Egypt, depicting an adult seizing a lungfish in a wetland while a juvenile looks on. The scene reflects the rich Quseir Formation ecosystem, complete with turtles and dense vegetation revealed by fossil evidence.

Credit: Nathan Dehaut – Artwork / MUVP – Scientific supervision

A New Global Discovery by Mansoura University's Vertebrate Paleontology Center - Mansoura University, Egypt

When scientists from Mansoura University, Egypt, recently announced in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London the discovery of an 80-million-year-old marine crocodyliform unearthed in Egypt’s Western Desert, the headlines hailed it as “the earliest known member of Dyrosauridae”, a forgotten branch of ancient crocodile-relatives adapted for coastal and marine life.

Found in mid-Campanian deposits of the Quseir Formation, Wadisuchus kassabi is represented by partial skulls and jaws from several individuals — enough to show that by this stage dyrosaurids already possessed the long, narrow snout and needle-sharp teeth suited for grabbing fish or turtles. What makes this find so important is not merely the age — though pushing the dyrosaurid fossil record back by several million years is notable — but the evolutionary implications and what it tells us about the scientific method. The cranial anatomy of Wadisuchus exhibits a transitional mixture of primitive and derived features: reduced premaxillary alveoli, modified jaw-occlusion patterns, and dorsally positioned nostrils for surface-breathing, reflecting a transitional form on the path from earlier crocodyliforms toward specialised marine dyrosaurids. Phylogenetic analyses consistently recover Wadisuchus as the basal (earliest-diverging) dyrosaurid — pushing the origin and early diversification of the family deeper into the Cretaceous.

This discovery underscores a fundamental truth of modern science: claims are not fixed dogma, but provisional explanations always subject to revision in the light of new evidence. Just as Wadisuchus reshapes our view of when and where dyrosaurids emerged, other fossil finds have repeatedly nudged back the origins of major vertebrate lineages, re-drawn phylogenetic trees, or revealed unexpected ancestral forms. In this way the scientific method resembles nothing so much as a continual conversation with Nature — a conversation always open to challenge, refinement, or outright contradiction when the data demand it.

Unlike creationists, whom recent research has shown, believe not changing their mind is a sign of strength of character and commitment to their 'faith', scientists know that the real test of character is a willingness to accept the evidence and the humility to allow it to dictate opinion.

Incidentally, it might come as a shock to creationists that a marine fossil was found in the Sahara Desert and that Earth was not created as it just a few thousand years ago, but has changed significantly over the millions of years, including periods of 'green Sahara'. As someone who has flown in a small plane over the Egyptian desert, I can attest to the existence of dry riverbeds and feeder streams in that desert, even though today rain is almost unknown in the vicinity of Luxor.