Refuting Creationism - Ancient Hunters Targeted Female Mammoths - 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mammoth bone accumulation site, Kraków Spadzista, Poland

Photo: Jarosław Wilczyñski

Excavation in Langmannersdorf, Austria, 2025.

Photo: Marc Händel/Austrian Academy of Sciences

Ancient DNA reveals Ice Age hunter-gatherers preferentially targeted female mammoths - Stockholms universitet

A heap of ancient bones does not come with a label explaining how it was formed. When large accumulations of woolly mammoth remains are found at Upper Palaeolithic sites, archaeologists must determine whether the animals were killed by people, scavenged after natural deaths, or accumulated through entirely natural processes such as floods, landslides or animals becoming trapped in bogs.

Cut marks, deliberately broken bones and stone projectile points embedded in mammoth remains show that humans sometimes hunted and butchered these enormous animals. But such evidence is not present on every bone, leaving open the possibility that some of the great mammoth bonebeds of Eurasia resulted largely from natural mortality rather than sustained human exploitation.

Now an international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has approached the problem from an ingenious new direction: instead of asking only what happened to the bones, they used ancient DNA to determine whether the mammoths were male or female.

As described in a newly published paper in Current Biology, the researchers analysed genome data from 521 woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, recovered across Eurasia and North America. These included 448 animals sequenced for the first time, making this one of the largest palaeogenomic studies yet undertaken on an extinct species.

The contrast was striking. Among 421 mammoths recovered as dispersed remains from natural depositional settings, 66 per cent were male and only 34 per cent female. That male bias is consistent with the behaviour of modern elephants: adult males commonly leave their natal herds and live alone, making them more likely to take risks or become caught in natural traps such as bogs, sinkholes and landslides.

However, among 100 mammoths from large bone accumulations associated with Upper Palaeolithic people, the ratio was almost exactly reversed: 70 per cent were female and only 30 per cent male. As the researchers explain, this substantial difference provides population-scale evidence that human activity, rather than natural mortality alone, was the principal force creating these bone accumulations.

That does not necessarily mean that hunters deliberately selected females simply because they were smaller than adult males. If mammoths lived like modern elephants, females and their young would have travelled in matriarchal herds capable of mounting a formidable collective defence. However, such herds may also have followed more predictable routes than solitary males, making them easier for hunter-gatherers to locate repeatedly. People may have hunted them, scavenged animals that died along those routes, or—most probably—used a combination of both strategies.

Either way, the result opens a remarkable window onto human behaviour between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. Mammoths supplied meat and fat for food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for construction, and ivory for tools, ornaments and works of art. By combining genetics with archaeology and knowledge of elephant social behaviour, scientists can now reconstruct something of how Upper Palaeolithic people located and exploited this critically important resource.

And all this human ingenuity, accumulated ecological knowledge and repeated interaction with mammoth herds was taking place tens of thousands of years before creationists believe their god created Earth and everything upon it. Once again, the evidence reveals not a recently created world interrupted by a global flood, but a deep and richly documented human past—one preserved not merely in tools and bones, but in fragments of ancient DNA surviving within those bones.

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.

Refuting Creationism - Reassessing The 'Bite Marks' on 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Fossils

Impression of a Tyrannosaurus rex attacking an Edmontosaurus annectens

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Tooth traces on ulna HRS10076.

A) Ulna with black boxes indicating areas with tooth traces. B-C) Magnification of corresponding boxes from Fig 7A. White arrows indicate pits and red arrows indicate parallel scores.

C. T. Siviero B, et al (2026)

Study finds marks in fossilized dinosaur bones may not always be bite marks | News

Last month produced the usual crop of research papers which, quite incidentally, refuted creationism simply by revealing evidence utterly incompatible with its basic dogmas. It also produced another answer to a favourite creationist conspiracy theory: that scientists are not permitted to publish anything that challenges the supposedly ‘materialist orthodoxy’ of the scientific establishment.

This allegation confuses philosophical materialism with methodological naturalism. Science confines itself to explanations that can be tested against evidence. That is a working method, not a compulsory metaphysical belief. Findings that challenge established interpretations are not prohibited; provided they are supported by evidence and survive critical scrutiny, they are an essential part of the way science advances.

Literalist creationism works in the opposite direction. It begins with the non-negotiable conclusion that scripture must be inerrant, so any contrary evidence must be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with that predetermined belief. Changing one’s mind in response to evidence is therefore treated not as intellectual honesty but as a failure of faith.

Creationists consequently try to have it both ways. When scientists agree, this is presented as evidence of a conspiracy suppressing dissent; when scientists challenge or refine an earlier interpretation, it supposedly proves that scientists are always changing their minds and that science is therefore unreliable. It is a convenient rhetorical trick in which both consistency and self-correction are declared to be evidence against science.

A modest but revealing example is a study published recently in PLOS ONE by researchers from Loma Linda University, Western University of Health Sciences, The Master’s University, Southern Adventist University and Southwestern Adventist University. Four of those five institutions are explicitly Christian: Loma Linda, Southern Adventist and Southwestern Adventist are Seventh-day Adventist universities, while The Master’s University declares a commitment to Christ and ‘biblical fidelity’. So much for the supposed exclusion of religious scientists from mainstream scientific publication.

The paper itself is not creationist research: it employs standard palaeontological methods and places the fossils within the conventional Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous. What it does show is that evidence-based research can be published and scrutinised irrespective of the religious affiliations of the institutions involved.

The researchers examined 3,013 dinosaur bones, most belonging to Edmontosaurus annectens, excavated between 1997 and 2017 from the Hanson Ranch Station bonebed in the Lance Formation of eastern Wyoming. Thirteen bones initially displayed perforations or other features that resembled tooth traces. Closer examination—including microscopy, comparison with other fossils and, in an ambiguous case, CT scanning—showed that one specimen contained normal openings in the bone, or foramina, rather than bite marks. The remaining 12 bones, just under 0.4 per cent of the total examined, preserved genuine tooth traces.

Four of those bones carried particularly diagnostic traces known as Knethichnus parallelum and Linichnus serratus. By comparing the spacing of the preserved striations and serrations with the denticles on carnivorous dinosaur teeth recovered from the same bonebed, the researchers identified Tyrannosaurus rex as the most likely culprit. Other, less diagnostic marks may have been produced by crocodilians living in the same ecosystem.

Most of the tooth traces showed no associated bone remodelling, suggesting that they were inflicted at or after the time of death. The evidence therefore points more strongly towards scavenging than successful predation, although the two cannot always be distinguished. Weathering, bioerosion and characteristic fractures in fresh bone also indicate that the carcasses remained exposed for some time before burial and were probably exploited by theropods, crocodilians or both.

Refuting Creationism - How Spiders Got Their Fangs - 518 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of Urokodia.

Credit: Xiaodong Wang

UROKODIA! 518-million-year-old fossil shows beginning of spider’s bite | News | University of Leicester

The World Spider Catalog currently recognises more than 54,000 living species of spider, and tens of thousands more may remain undiscovered. Every one of them possesses a pair of specialised mouthparts called chelicerae, each of which terminates in a fang. In most spiders, these fangs inject venom, although a few lineages have lost their venom glands and subdue their prey by other means.

Chelicerae are not, however, unique to spiders. They are the defining appendages of the Chelicerata, the major arthropod group that also includes scorpions, mites, ticks, harvestmen and horseshoe crabs. Scorpions possess small, pincer-like chelicerae near the mouth; their conspicuous claws are modified pedipalps, while their venom is delivered through a sting at the end of the tail. In other chelicerates, the same basic pair of appendages has been modified into pincers, piercing mouthparts or other feeding structures.

This shared anatomy strongly suggests that chelicerae were inherited from a common ancestor and subsequently modified as the different chelicerate lineages evolved. But what did the ancestral appendage look like, and when did it first appear?

Such questions inevitably involve gaps in the fossil record—gaps that creationists routinely misrepresent as evidence against evolution. Their argument depends upon portraying evolutionary theory as little more than a story constructed from fossils and therefore requiring an unbroken succession of specimens linking every species to its ancestors. Evolutionary theory requires no such thing. Fossilisation is an exceptionally rare event, and evolutionary relationships are reconstructed from multiple independent lines of evidence, including comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics and the fossils that happen to have survived.

Nevertheless, creationists will be disappointed to learn that another important part of this particular gap has now been bridged. A paper published in Nature by a Chinese-British research team led by Yu Liu and Lorenzo Lustri of Yunnan University describes the remarkably preserved anatomy of Urokodia aequalis, a small marine arthropod recovered from the famous Chengjiang fossil site in Yunnan Province, southern China. The rock formation containing it dates from approximately 518 million years ago.

Creationism Refuted - Most Complete Fossil Early Canid - From 30 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mesocyon coryphaeus in its natural setting

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Mesocyon coryphaeus hunting.

Image credit: Roger Witter

Most complete skeleton of 30 million-year-old dog discovered | University of Michigan News

My last blog post concerned a 210-million-year-old, gap-filling dinosaur from Zimbabwe that is helping palaeontologists to reconstruct the early evolution and dispersal of dinosaurs.

This post concerns another gap-filling fossil, although one from much closer to the present—just 30 million years ago. It is a remarkably complete skeleton of the early canid Mesocyon coryphaeus, one of the most complete pre-Ice Age canid skeletons yet found in North America.

This specimen fills a different sort of gap. Mesocyon coryphaeus, first named in 1879, is relatively common in the John Day Formation of Oregon, but it was previously known principally from skulls and teeth. Its postcranial skeleton—the bones behind the skull—had remained almost entirely unknown. The new specimen therefore fills an important anatomical gap in our understanding of how early canids moved, hunted and responded to the changing environments of Oligocene North America.

The fossil itself has had a curious history. It was collected during the late 1980s from land administered by the Bureau of Land Management near what is now the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Encased in a protective plaster jacket, it entered the monument’s collection after initially being mistaken for an oreodont—an extinct North American even-toed ungulate sometimes loosely described as resembling a mixture of sheep, camel and pig.

During the 1990s, the skull was separated from the surrounding rock for display, whereupon its teeth and cranial anatomy revealed that it was actually a canid. Park palaeontologists began exposing the remainder of the skeleton in 2012, but preparation continued intermittently for years. By the time the fossil was fully uncovered in 2022, more than 500 hours of painstaking preparation had been devoted to it.

University of Michigan palaeontologist Anne E. Kort, together with Jennifer Cavin of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, formally described the specimen in a paper published online in the Journal of Paleontology on 29 May 2026.

Known as JODA 3366, the specimen includes a complete cranium, an almost complete vertebral column in front of the sacrum, all the major limb bones and parts of both the forefeet and hindfeet. Only the tail and portions of the hands and feet are missing. It even preserves part of the baculum, or penis bone, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that the animal was male.

Creationism Refuted - Another Gap Is Closed by Science - With A Dinosaur From 210 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Musango matusadonaensis in its natural setting

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Based on an illustration by Mark Witton.

When Musango matusadonaensis was alive, it would have lived alongside ancient rivers and streams.

© Mark Witton 2026

New Zimbabwean dinosaur species named by Museum scientist reveals Africa’s hidden history | Natural History Museum

It is gap-filling time again — not because palaeontologists have discovered some predetermined evolutionary “missing link”, but because another conspicuous blank on the palaeontological map is being filled. This time, the new evidence comes from Africa and concerns a dinosaur that lived about 210 million years ago, during the Late Triassic.

The discovery sheds new light on the early diversification and geographical distribution of dinosaurs, when they were still only a relatively minor component of terrestrial ecosystems. Over the following millions of years, they diversified into an extraordinary range of forms and became the dominant large land animals of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Gaps in the fossil record are, of course, eagerly seized upon by creationists desperate to find somewhere to insert their god. Their enthusiasm tends to diminish markedly whenever palaeontologists recover new evidence from one of those gaps. Each such discovery removes another supposed refuge for the ever-shrinking god of the gaps, so the evidence must be dismissed as misidentified, incorrectly dated or merely another example of “evolutionary storytelling”.

No matter how many gaps science fills, creationists continue to assure themselves that the next one will be different: that it will finally be the gap that science cannot investigate and into which their preferred creator can safely be inserted. Unfortunately for that strategy, palaeontologists continue to discover fossils, dating methods continue to improve, and previously neglected regions continue to be explored.

This latest discovery consists of a partial skeleton excavated from exposures of the Late Triassic Pebbly Arkose Formation on the shore of Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe. An international team of Zimbabwean, South African and British scientists has named the animal Musango matusadonaensis. The study was led by Professor Paul M. Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, while the expeditions during which the fossils were collected were led by Professor Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolutionary Studies Institute.

Musango was an early sauropodomorph — a member of the lineage that later produced the enormous, long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus. Unlike those gigantic four-legged descendants, however, Musango was a relatively lightly built, predominantly bipedal animal. It measured an estimated 4.5 metres in length but weighed only about 222 kilograms. Its skull has not been recovered, so its diet cannot be established with certainty, although comparisons with related dinosaurs suggest that it was probably herbivorous or omnivorous.

The fossil record of early dinosaurs is extremely uneven. Europe, North America and parts of South America have been studied far more intensively than much of Africa, leaving large gaps caused not necessarily by the absence of dinosaurs but by the scarcity of sustained palaeontological exploration. Musango is only the fifth dinosaur formally named from Zimbabwe, following the description in 2024 of another sauropodomorph from the same formation, Musankwa sanyatiensis.

Phylogenetic analysis places Musango and Musankwa as close relatives within Unaysauridae, a group whose fossils are known from Africa, India and South America — landmasses that were then joined within Gondwana. Together, these discoveries support an emerging picture in which Late Triassic southern Africa contained several distinct ecosystems with their own dinosaur communities, rather than a single uniform fauna extending across the region. Africa was therefore not a peripheral spectator in early dinosaur evolution; its still-underexplored rocks may preserve crucial evidence about how dinosaurs diversified and spread before their later ecological dominance.

Creationism Refuted - Another Gap Closed with a 23-Million-Year-Old Fossil - Just as The Theory Of Evolution Predicted

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Reconstruction of Miyumba chrisdickmani in its natural setting.

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Australia’s most diverse marsupial predators have been hiding their origins for millions of years

To a palaeontologist, a gap in the fossil record is an unanswered question and an invitation to keep looking. To a creationist, it is more often treated as a convenient space in which to insert a supernatural explanation. The difficulty for creationism is that scientists have an inconvenient habit of finding the missing evidence, whereupon the gap becomes smaller, the evolutionary history becomes clearer, and creationists must quietly move their supernatural explanation somewhere else.

A particularly neat example is provided by a paper just published in Australian Zoologist by Timothy J. Churchill, Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand and Roy M. Farman. As Churchill explains in an article in The Conversation, a handful of tiny fossil jaws from north-western Queensland has supplied a previously missing opening chapter in the evolutionary history of Australia’s most diverse family of marsupial predators.

The family Dasyuridae contains almost 80 living species, including Tasmanian devils, quolls, dunnarts, planigales and antechinuses. They range from insect-eaters weighing only a few grams to the much larger Tasmanian devil, and occupy environments extending from the tropical rainforests of New Guinea to Australian deserts, grasslands and alpine woodland. Yet, despite this modern diversity, their early fossil history had remained frustratingly obscure.

Molecular studies indicated that dasyurids had diverged from their closest relatives millions of years before the earliest unambiguous fossils then known. Almost all accepted dasyurid fossils were younger than about five million years, leaving what palaeontologists call a “ghost lineage”: a branch whose existence was indicated by evolutionary relationships, but whose earlier fossil representatives had not yet been found. The animal once thought to fill that gap, Barinya wangala, was subsequently shown to belong to an entirely different family of peculiar, probably snail-eating marsupials called malleodectids.

Creationists sometimes present such gaps as evidence against evolution, apparently assuming that unless every organism that ever lived has obligingly become fossilised, been exposed at the surface and been discovered, the evolutionary history can be dismissed. But incompleteness is not inconsistency. Fossilisation is rare, suitable rocks are unevenly distributed, and tiny, fragile animals are especially unlikely to leave recognisable remains. Evolution nevertheless predicted that earlier dasyurids had existed. The question was whether any of them would eventually be found.

The new species, named Miyumba chrisdickmani, is known from six partial lower jaws recovered from Early Miocene deposits in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area on Waanyi Country. It lived about 23 million years ago and probably weighed only about 30 grams, making it comparable in size to a modern antechinus or large dunnart. It is now the oldest confirmed member of Dasyuridae, extending the family’s recognised fossil history by more than five million years.

Its significance, however, lies in much more than its age. The teeth of Miyumba possess a particular arrangement in which the third lower premolar is smaller than the first and second. This appears to be a shared derived characteristic, or synapomorphy, identifying dasyurids as a natural evolutionary group. At the same time, Miyumba retains several ancestral dental features expected in an animal close to the base of that group’s family tree.

That combination is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts: an early member of a lineage should possess the defining innovations inherited by its descendants while retaining features inherited from more distant ancestors. It should not look exactly like a modern Tasmanian devil, quoll or dunnart because those specialised forms had not yet evolved. Nor should it be unrelated to them. It should display a mosaic of ancestral and newly evolved characteristics — and that is exactly what Miyumba does.

How Snakes Lost Their Legs - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

80-million-year-old snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering

Of all the primitive ‘just-so’ stories in Genesis, the tale of how the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly must rank among the most transparently mythological. Having supposedly tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, God curses the serpent to go on its belly and ‘eat dust’ for the rest of its life. Although the story never explicitly says that the serpent previously had legs, the curse plainly implies a change and has traditionally been understood as an explanation for why snakes slither instead of walking.

Like so much of Genesis, it begins with an observation familiar to its authors—snakes have no legs—and invents a magical tale to explain it. It is an ancient example of an etiological myth: folklore devised to explain why something in the natural world appears as it does, long before anyone had the evidence or intellectual framework needed to understand its real history.

Even as mythology, however, the story is strangely incoherent. Genesis itself does not identify the serpent as Satan but introduces it as the most cunning of the wild animals God had made. Nevertheless, this supposedly ordinary animal can speak, reason and somehow knows about a prohibition that God had given to Adam before Eve had even been created. The text makes no attempt to explain how it acquired either this knowledge or the power of speech.

More awkward still for anyone insisting that the story is literally true, the serpent’s predictions prove substantially more accurate than God’s warning. God tells Adam that he will die on the day he eats the fruit. The serpent tells Eve that they will not die, that their eyes will be opened and that they will become like God, knowing good and evil. They eat the fruit, their eyes are opened and they do not die that day. God then confirms that the humans have indeed become ‘like one of us’ in knowing good and evil. According to Genesis itself, Adam goes on to live for another 930 years.

On the most straightforward reading of the story, therefore, the serpent tells Eve the truth while God’s threat to Adam proves false. Later theologians have attempted to rescue the tale by inventing a ‘spiritual death’, or by claiming that Adam merely began to die that day, but neither qualification appears in the text. These are apologetic repairs added by people who can see the problem but cannot admit that the story’s authors created it.

Science, meanwhile, has uncovered a very different account of how snakes acquired their extraordinary bodies—one involving neither talking reptiles nor fruit, curses or human disobedience, but descent with modification over immense periods of geological time. Snakes are highly modified members of the squamate reptile radiation. Their ancestors progressively elongated their bodies, increased the number of vertebrae and reduced their limbs as different lineages adapted to particular ways of life. Their evolutionary history extends back at least to the Middle Jurassic, about 160 million years ago.

Now, a paper published in Nature by an international team led by Tiago R. Simões describes an exceptionally well-preserved early snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Named Tametara mirim, the animal lived approximately 85–75 million years ago, when non-avian dinosaurs still dominated terrestrial ecosystems. It is the first articulated snake fossil known from Brazil and preserves a three-dimensional skull together with more than 100 connected vertebrae.

The preserved portion of its skeleton appears to have lacked forelimbs. Because the region around the pelvis is missing, the researchers cannot determine whether it retained vestigial hindlimbs, as some other early snakes did. Its skull also combines recognisably snake-like specialisations with ancestral features resembling those of other squamate reptiles—precisely the sort of mosaic of old and new characteristics expected in an evolving lineage, but not from the instantaneous transformation of an animal by a divine curse.

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 - Death More Than 66 Million Years Before Mythical 'Sin'

A Tyrannosaur stalking an edmontosaurus

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"The Bite"

Paleoartist Jenn Hall.

Rare fossil at Montana State’s Museum of the Rockies records Tyrannosaurus attack

A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.

The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.

In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.

The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’

Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.

In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’

And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.

Creationism Refuted - Earth Is 'Fine-Tuned' For Disasters And Mass Extinctions

Researchers confirm cause of Earth’s biggest mass extinction | Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Studying the metabolism of living brachiopods like these collected from San Juan Island, Washington, allowed Stanford researchers to understand how the physiology of the modern fauna and Paleozoic fauna may have differed and how these groups would have been differentially impacted by oxygen and temperature changes during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.

Image credit: Erik Sperling.

Many of Earth's climatic, geological and biological processes behave as complex, nonlinear systems, resembling systems in chaos. In this context, “chaotic” does not mean random. It means that small differences in starting conditions can sometimes be amplified until they produce very different outcomes — the phenomenon popularly known as the “butterfly effect”. The butterfly is not literally responsible for a distant storm; it merely illustrates how a tiny disturbance can cascade through a sufficiently complex system.

This is not the picture of a planet engineered to remain permanently benign or perfectly “fine-tuned” for life — still less for human life in the United States. Earth is habitable, but its habitability is contingent and sometimes precarious. The same interacting atmospheric, oceanic, geological and biological processes that sustain life can, when pushed beyond critical thresholds, drive abrupt environmental change, ecological collapse and mass extinction.

At several points in Earth's history, reinforcing feedbacks have transformed relatively small initial disturbances into rapid and profound environmental changes. Organisms adapted to the previous conditions were then confronted with combinations of heat, cold, acidification, oxygen loss or other stresses occurring too quickly for most populations to adapt. The result was widespread extinction.

What has been less well understood is why some groups were devastated while others living in the same changing environment survived. This is an important question for us because every organism alive today is descended from lineages that somehow survived every previous mass extinction.

Research by a Stanford University-led team, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), now offers an experimentally supported explanation for one of the most striking patterns associated with the end-Permian mass extinction — the “Great Dying” of about 252 million years ago.

Creationism Refuted - Giant Kangaroos In New Guinea - 1,500 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Impression of Protemnodon tumbuna

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Giant kangaroos survived until 6,500 years ago on the New Guinea coast.

It is probably fair to say that no branch of science is a friend of creationism. That is presumably why creationists devote so much time and effort to trying to discredit science—often without the slightest appreciation of the irony of using computers and the Internet, both products of science and engineering, to tell the world that science does not work. Yet their attitude towards science is not merely hostile but opportunistic: whenever they encounter a scientific finding that they think can be misrepresented as supporting creationism, they suddenly become jubilant champions of ‘the evidence’.

Archaeology is one of the most persistent threats to literalist creationism. Far from confirming the biblical narrative, it repeatedly uncovers evidence of human cultures, environmental changes and extinct animals extending far beyond the few thousand years permitted by Young Earth Creationism. Nor does archaeology stand alone. Its findings repeatedly converge with those of genetics, palaeontology, geology and climatology to produce the same coherent history—a history in which neither a recent magical creation nor a global genocidal flood leaves the slightest trace.

True to form, a recently published paper in the journal npj Biodiversity, by an Australian-based team of archaeologists and palaeontologists, presents evidence from New Guinea that simply could not exist if the biblical narratives of a magical creation a few thousand years ago, followed by a global flood about 4,300 years ago, bore any resemblance to reality. The evidence indicates that a large extinct kangaroo relative—probably Protemnodon tumbuna—survived on the northern coast of New Guinea until the Middle Holocene, perhaps as recently as about 6,500 years ago.

This was tens of thousands of years after every known species of Protemnodon had disappeared from Australia, where the genus is thought to have become extinct by about 41,000 years ago, along with most of the continent’s other megafauna.

Protemnodon tumbuna was a stocky, muscular forest-dwelling kangaroo weighing an estimated 50–90 kilograms—roughly comparable in size to a modern red kangaroo. Unlike modern large kangaroos, however, it was probably predominantly quadrupedal, using its powerful forelimbs to move through dense forest and hopping only inefficiently and for short distances, if at all. It was one of seven currently recognised species of Protemnodon known collectively from Australia and New Guinea.

Refuting Creationism - Population Collapse And Migration in Neolithic Europe - And No Evidence Of A Genocidal Flood

The researchers have conducted DNA analyses of the skeletons from a burial site like this one in France and found traces of several different diseases.

Photo: Getty Images / Michal Boubin

Stone age population collapse revealed by DNA study in France – University of Copenhagen

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a large international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, reports evidence that simply should not exist if the Bible creation myth, and its later global genocidal flood myth, had any basis in reality. The evidence shows a significant population collapse among Neolithic farming communities in what is now northern France about 5,000 years ago, followed by migration into the depopulated area by people with strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The study is based on ancient DNA from 132 individuals buried in the allée sépulcrale at Bury, a large megalithic tomb about 50 kilometres north of Paris. The site was used during two distinct burial phases, separated by a hiatus associated with the wider Neolithic decline around 3000 BC. The researchers found that the people buried before and after this decline were not simply later descendants of the same local population, but belonged to largely discontinuous genetic groups. In other words, this was not merely a change in burial custom; it was a major population turnover.

The problems this presents for creationism are multiple. First, there is the evidence of established farming populations in northern Europe at a time when, according to Young Earth Creationist chronology, the world had only recently been magicked into existence. Secondly, there is the embarrassing survival of archaeological and genetic evidence which, under the same mythology, should either have been destroyed in a global flood a few centuries later, or buried beneath a distinctive, worldwide layer of fossil-bearing flood silt — a layer which is conspicuous by its absence. Thirdly, there is the evidence that the human population of Europe had already diversified into regionally distinct genetic populations by about 3000 BC, with enough structure for ancient DNA to distinguish northern French and German-like Neolithic farmers from later migrants with strong southern French and Iberian affinities.

None of this, of course, will cause creationists to reconsider the mythology. We can confidently predict that it will instead be treated as another test of faith: one more opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their determination never to let evidence change their minds. In creationist apologetics, refusal to learn is often mistaken for intellectual victory. The more compelling the evidence, the greater the achievement in ignoring it.

The reason for the population decline is not yet clear. The human remains contained genetic traces of pathogens, including the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the louse-borne relapsing fever bacterium, Borrelia recurrentis, but the evidence does not support plague as the sole cause of the collapse. The more likely explanation is a combination of disease, environmental stress, demographic disruption and social breakdown. Earlier burials contained multiple generations from the same extended families, suggesting stable, kin-based communities. Later burials were more selective and were dominated by a single male lineage, indicating a marked change in social organisation after the population turnover.

This adds to the growing picture of the so-called Neolithic decline as a widespread phenomenon affecting much of northern and western Europe, not just Scandinavia and northern Germany. It also offers a plausible explanation for the abrupt disappearance of megalithic tomb-building and other monumental traditions across parts of Europe at about the same time. The people who built those monuments did not merely change their minds about architecture; in places such as the Paris Basin, the population itself appears to have collapsed and been replaced.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Hominins Were Using Fire In A South African Cave - About 1.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stages of Burning on Bones – white (#5 on right) is the most burnt while yellow-beige (on left #1) is unburnt

Credit: Wonderwerk Cave Project.

Ancient Fire Record Rewritten: Researchers Push Earliest Evidence of Human Fire Use Back to over a Million Years | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

A recent paper in PLOS ONE, by an international team including Dr Liora Kolska Horwitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reminded me of a quote by Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project and founder and president of The BioLogos Foundation, which aims to reconcile Christian theology with science. It also reminded me how Young Earth Creationists traditionally cope with information that refutes their beliefs. The paper reports evidence for the use of fire in a South African cave by early hominins between 1.07 million and 1.79 million years ago — a fact entirely inconsistent with Young Earth Creationism (YEC).

This image of God as a cosmic trickster seems to be the ultimate admission of defeat for the Creationist perspective. Would God as the great deceiver be an entity one would want to worship? Is this consistent with everything else we know about God from the Bible, from the Moral Law, and from every other source—namely, that He is loving, logical, and consistent?

Thus, by any reasonable standard, Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology. Its persistence is thus one of the great puzzles and great tragedies of our time.

Francis Collins - The Language of God

In this quote from The Language of God, Francis Collins is referring to those Young Earth Creationists who dismiss the palaeontological, archaeological and cosmological evidence for life evolving on an old Earth in an even older Universe, as evidence deliberately created by God to test the faith of believers. Creationists also routinely dismiss this sort of evidence either by accusing scientists of faking it, or by attributing it to the work of Satan.

All of these are, of course, variations on conspiracy thinking — more understandable in a teleologically thinking toddler than in an adult. When it persists into adulthood, it is consistent with the findings of a psychology research paper which found that creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias: the tendency to explain events and natural phenomena as though they exist for a purpose, or are directed towards some hidden end. It is therefore no surprise that creationism so often depends on conspiracism. The surprise is that there are still so many people, especially in parts of the USA, who try to understand the world around them using a cognitive habit most children eventually learn to leave behind.

Creationism Refuted - Our Ancestors Lived In North America - 56 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

Ai-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

At times, it seems almost cruel to keep reminding creationists that another day, another week and another month have passed, and still there is no hint that biomedical scientists are about to abandon evidence-based evolutionary biology and adopt magic-based creationism as a better explanation of the facts. And yet here we are again: another paper, another article, and another example of evolution providing the rational framework for interpreting the evidence.

And, to rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence deals with events around 56 million years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. As though to refute yet another creationist myth — that scientists are only allowed to publish papers that confirm mainstream scientific orthodoxy — the findings, published by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and colleagues in the mainstream journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), challenge the long-standing assumption that the primate lineage originated in warm tropical forests.

The study maps the likely geographic origins of our primate ancestors and reconstructs the historical climate at those locations. Its conclusion is surprising: early primates appear to have lived, dispersed and diversified through cold, arid and temperate regions, not primarily in the tropics. Their later colonisation of tropical regions took several million years and seems to have been driven more by local changes between dry and wet climates than by global warming itself.

One useful example is the tiny early primate Teilhardina, a small, tree-dwelling mammal known from fossils around 56 million years old — roughly 10 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that Teilhardina had nails rather than claws, helping it grasp branches and handle food, a characteristic associated with primates. Species of this early primate group appear in the fossil record of North America and then dispersed rapidly across what are now Europe and China.

An article explaining the finding and its significance for understanding our evolutionary origins was published in The Conversation by Jason Gilchrist, a lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - British Fallow Deer Have LOST Genetic Diversity - Over The Last 120,000 Years

Fallow deer, Dama dama

Photo credit: Jiří Nedorost.,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fallow deer

Photo credit: Memurubu, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UP News - University of Potsdam

A paper just published in iScience should, if they were aware of it, at least cause an honest creationist to question some basic assumptions. It reports that modern European fallow deer, Dama dama, retain only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in their Ice Age ancestors. This finding is based on ancient DNA recovered from the fossilised remains of ten, approximately 120,000-year-old fallow deer from Neumark-Nord in Germany, analysed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Creationism continues to take a battering in the world of real science, where yet another paper quite incidentally refutes several of its basic dogmas. Creationists, who are notoriously reluctant to read serious science and would probably struggle to understand it if they did, will no doubt remain blissfully unaware of this constant refutation of their core superstitions.

To ensure that ignorance is maintained, creationist disinformation sites expend considerable effort in spreading distrust of serious science amongst their followers. What cult leader would want his followers reading anything that exposes his claims as bogus?

However, ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and the facts this paper reveals go to the heart of creationist mythology. Firstly, this evidence should not exist at all if the Bible creation myth were real history: a magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global genocide, would leave no room for a 120,000-year-old population of fallow deer preserved in an Eemian lake environment. Secondly, it undermines the creationist parody of evolution that they so often attack: the false claim that evolution must always mean increasing complexity, and that any loss of genetic information is invariably fatal.

The reduced genetic diversity of modern fallow deer is a clear example of evolution involving a loss of genetic variation within a population. So far as individual deer are concerned, there need be no immediate reduction in fitness; the problem comes when a population has less capacity to respond to environmental change, disease, or other selective pressures, and may then be more vulnerable to extinction. Evolution, of course, has no plan. Unlike intelligent design, or even guided evolution, it cannot foresee future conditions and prepare a species for them. A species can be driven towards extinction by the simple operation of mindless natural processes.

Refuting Creation - With Goethe's 40-Million-Year-Old Ant

Amber piece 1552.b showing bioinclusions. Arrow in a (top): inclusion of †Ctenobethylus goepperti; arrow in b (bottom): inclusion of the Sciaridae. Scale bar 5 mm.

Boudinot, B.E., Bock, B.L., Tröger, D. et al. (2026)

Exceptionally Well-Preserved Ant in Goethe’s Amber | Uni Jena

Some years ago, while staying for a few days in Berlin in a hotel just off Goethestraße, I made the mistake of telling a taxi driver that our hotel was just off “Go-eth Straße”. It took several minutes and a map to sort out the confusion.

“Nein! Goethe-Straße!” he laughed. Only then did I realise that “Go-eth” and “Goethe” were not two different German philosophers.

“Ach ja! Danke! Goethe! Ich bin ein Engländer!” I explained, in my best German.

“Ja! Is better we speak English,” he replied.

Goethestraße — Goethe Street — is, of course, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the German writer, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also an administrator, scientist, geologist, botanist and philosopher. As a naturalist and collector, he left behind an extensive geological and mineralogical collection, including 40 pieces of Baltic amber, which have now been closely examined by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena — appropriately enough, since Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller were friends.

What they found was the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports, published in January 2026. It is not good news for creationists, since it concerns an approximately 40-million-year-old ant, preserved in exquisite detail and now visible using modern imaging techniques such as synchrotron micro-computed tomography. In addition to the ant, the scientists also found a fungus gnat and a blackfly in Goethe’s amber.

It is unlikely that Goethe knew these creatures were preserved in his amber, since the pieces are unpolished and the contents are barely visible to the untrained eye. He certainly could not have known that the amber was tens of millions of years old. Had he known, we can only speculate how that knowledge might have affected his view of nature, time and human origins. His famous work, Faust, draws deeply on Christian motifs, including the story of a man who makes a pact with the Devil; but Goethe was also a serious observer of nature, living at a time when geology, palaeontology and evolutionary thinking were still in their infancy.

In the early nineteenth century, Europeans had not yet accumulated the overwhelming evidence that Earth is billions of years old and that life has changed profoundly over vast periods of time. Many educated people still interpreted history, nature and morality through a biblical framework, even when their own thinking was more subtle than simple literalism. Goethe, despite his scientific curiosity, lived before Darwin, before modern stratigraphy was fully established, and long before modern imaging could reveal the hidden contents of an opaque piece of amber.

Now, of course, we know better, because of the tremendous scientific progress made over the last two centuries.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another Gap Is Closing - No God Found

Illustration of the Qreiya 3 fauna.

Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution | Michigan News

Complete skeleton of the oldest jack fish, part of the group that includes modern jacks and trevallies.

A close-up of sharp teeth in an early relative of modern tunas.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

There are only two things in the universe faster than light: monarchy and gods. When a monarch dies, the monarchy passes instantaneously to the sovereign’s heir, regardless of where either of them happens to be at the time; and when science shines a light into one of the gaps in which creationists have been hiding their god, the god has already departed. That, presumably, is why no god has ever been detected by science.

Creationist dependence on these god-shaped gaps has produced an ever-shrinking god as science fills one gap after another with evidence. The fallacy depends on the gamble that, unlike every previous gap closed by science, this one will turn out to require a supernatural creation event. It never does, of course, but that never seems to diminish creationist confidence that the next gap will be different.

True to form, science has now closed yet another gap with evidence, not magic. It is one few creationists are likely to know about, and fewer still would be willing to acknowledge, because it concerns a gap in the fossil record between the K–Pg mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 56 million years ago. In other words, it is a 10-million-year interval in the very long pre-‘Creation Week’ history of life on Earth — a history no self-respecting creationist can honestly admit exists without conceding that the Bible’s creation myth is not real history. Specifically, it is a gap in the fossil record of fish evolution, from the devastation at the K–Pg boundary to the later appearance of many species that look markedly different from those that preceded it.

That gap, known to palaeontologists as “Patterson’s Gap”, has now been partly filled by the discovery of the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups by a research team led by Sanaa El-Sayed, a University of Michigan doctoral student and researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center. The fossils were found in the Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte, dated to 62.2 million years ago, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The discovery has just been reported in Science Advances.

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

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

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

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Another Bizarre Dinosaur - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén.

Heron-like, fish-eating dinosaur from 70 million years ago discovered in Argentina - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In my previous post, I wrote about Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre distant relative of the crocodile line which walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and possessed a toothless mouth tipped with a beak. Although not a dinosaur, it looked superficially dinosaur-like — a neat example of convergent evolution. Because earlier and later shuvosaurids were already known from the region, palaeontologists predicted that a form occupying the gap between them should exist, and Labrujasuchus duly turned up in the right place and in the right rock formation.

That is how science works: evidence fits into a testable, predictive framework. Creationism, by contrast, has nothing to offer except hand-waving, misrepresentation and denial when confronted with a bizarre extinct archosaur from some 212 million years ago, just as it has nothing to offer in explanation of this almost equally bizarre dinosaur from about 70 million years ago.

The new species, Kank australis, is described by palaeontologist Dr Matías J. Motta, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”), and his colleagues in a paper published on 28 May 2026 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Kank australis was a paravian theropod — an unenlagiid, belonging to a group of small- to medium-sized raptor-like dinosaurs known from Late Cretaceous Gondwanan deposits. Its discoverers suggest that it may have lived rather like a large heron. Its long jaws, armed with teeth, suggest a fish-eating habit, while its cervical vertebrae show structures associated with muscle attachment and the protection of neck blood vessels, features comparable with those seen in modern birds that rely on rapid, precise neck movements. In other words, this was probably not the familiar pop-culture image of a raptor as a fast-running terrestrial predator, but a specialised animal exploiting the riverine and wetland ecosystems of southern Patagonia.

And, as so often with new fossil discoveries, Kank australis fills in yet another of those gaps so beloved of creationists looking for somewhere to hide their ever-shrinking little god. In this case, it helps bridge a distributional gap in the Late Cretaceous record of southern Patagonia, connecting better-known unenlagiid records from northern Patagonia with those from Antarctica, and adding more detail to the still-patchy evolutionary history of these South American paravian dinosaurs.