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

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

Art by Cullen Townsend.

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

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

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

Woolley C. Henrik, et al. (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Another Fossil; Another Thorny Problem for Creationists

Artist's impression of Spicomellus afer

Credit: Matt Dempsey

Fossils of S. afer

© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

“Bizarre” armoured dinosaur, Spicomellus afer, had spikes sticking out from its neck, fossils show - University of Birmingham

A newly-identified bizarre dinosaur fossil from Morocco has presented creationists with yet another thorny problem to ignore.

It is that of an ankylosaur from early in the evolutionary history of that group. Not only is its great age a problem for those who believe Earth was magicked into existence by a god with all living things fully formed and an environment perfectly tuned for life (i.e. human life — supposedly the god’s favourite), but at 165 million years old it comes from the vast span of Earth’s pre-“Creation Week” history — that 99.9975% of the planet’s history which creationists pretend never happened. This is, in fact, the oldest ankylosaur yet discovered.

Unlike later ankylosaurs, however, this one had long spikes firmly attached to its bones. These appear to have been lost as the group evolved, showing relatively rapid change. That in itself runs counter to the creationist dogma that evolution cannot proceed by loss of genetic information and must always involve increasing complexity for it to be “real” evolution. This claim, like so many creationist assertions, ignores abundant evidence — such as the reduction in genome size and anatomical complexity in many endoparasites.

Now they have yet another example to ignore while busily constructing their infantile strawman versions of evolution to attack.

The discovery by palaeontologists co-led by Professor Susannah Maidment of Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Birmingham, has just been reported in Nature and is explained in a news item from the University of Birmingham and an accompanying YouTube video:

Refuting Creationism - Ferocious Ancestor of Crocodiles - 70 Million Years Before Creation Week

Kostensuchus atrox – life restauration, 3 meters long.

Art by Gabriel Diaz Yanten. (CC-BY 4.0)

Figure 2. Skull and jaw of Kostensuchus atrox gen. et sp. nov.
Photographs in (A) right lateral, (B) dorsal, and (C) ventral views. Interpretative drawings in (D) right lateral, (E) dorsal, and (F) ventral views. Abbreviations: ang, angular; ap, anterior palpebral; de, dentary; ec, ectopterygoid; fr, frontal; j, jugal; la, lacrimal; mx, maxilla; pa, parietal; pal, palatine; pmx, premaxilla; pnf, perinarial fossa; po, postorbital; pp, posterior palpebral; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; qj, quadratojugal; na, nasal; rarp, retroarticular process; sang, surangular; sof, suborbital fossa; spl, splenial; sq, squamosal; stf, subtympanic foramen. Scale bar 5 cm.

Novas FE, et al. (2025)

New crocodile-relative “hypercarnivore” from prehistoric Patagonia was 11.5ft long and weighed 250kg | EurekAlert!

Seventy million years before creationists believe the universe even existed, a ferocious crocodile was prowling the rivers of what is now Brazil. Its fossil remains, recently described in an open-access paper in PLOS One and summarised in a press release from EurekAlert, add yet another line to the mountain of evidence that life has a vast, deep history stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

For creationists, however, discoveries like this present a problem. To remain in the cosy confines of their self-referencing dogma, they must either ignore such evidence or twist it into their narrative that evolution is a Satanic lie and the universe is only a few thousand years old because the Bible says so. Their mission, as they see it, is to defend God’s revealed truth from the “deceptions” of science.

But even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, that a god created the universe and a demonic adversary named Satan exists, the logic collapses under its own weight. Surely it would have been easier for Satan to forge a single book than to fabricate all the astronomical, geological, radiometric, genetic, and fossil evidence pointing to an ancient universe and the evolutionary diversification of life. The alternative is that the creator itself deliberately falsified the evidence science uncovers—yet creationists prefer to believe that this same deceiver told the truth in just one book.

And so the walls of the creationist cult remain, impervious to evidence. But outside those walls, science continues to reveal the true story of life on Earth, in discoveries like this ancient crocodile from long before “Creation Week”—from a time when, according to creationist belief, nothing at all should have existed.

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

Reconstruction of Nektognathus, swimming in the Cambrian Sea

Image credit: Bob Nicholls

The holotype specimen of Nektognathus from Sirius Passet

Image credit: Tae Yoon Park

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - A Japanese Ichthyosaur - From 220 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s illustration of the Nariwa ichthyosaur

Kyoko Ikari

CT cross-sectional image of the fossil-bearing rock block

Bone parts identified from CT scan cross-sections

A Chance Spotting of a Fossil Results in a Major Scientific Discovery. Ichthyosaur Fossil Confirmed for the First Time in Western Japan — Also the First Late Triassic Ichthyosaur Found in Japan | NEWS & TOPICS | Okayama University of Science

Today's casual refutation of creationism is not the result of scientists deliberately setting out to discredit Bible mythology, but comes instead as an incidental by-product of scientific discovery. Once again, the facts uncovered by science simply could not be true if the biblical narrative were correct.

This time the evidence is a fossilised Late Triassic ichthyosaur, embedded in 220-million-year-old rocks. That date alone places the animal in the unimaginably vast span of Earth’s history long before creationist mythology claims the universe, the Earth, and all life were conjured into existence ex nihilo by a pre-existing deity muttering magic words. In reality, this ichthyosaur lived during the 99.9975% of history that biblical literalism must pretend never happened.

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

A researcher holds a stone tool in Korolevo.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

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

A map showing the migration of hominins through Europe.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Duck DNA Shows Us Why The Bible Is Literally Wrong

Auckland Island merganser. Artistic reconstruction by J. G. Keulemans.

from Bullers Birds of New Zealand (1888)

A wave of scientific knowledge engulfing creationist ignorance

With apologies to Katsushika Hokusai.

Ancient DNA from an extinct native duck reveals how far birds flew to make New Zealand home

Scientists never set out to prove that the Biblical account of science and history as related in Genesis is hopelessly wrong and based on the childish guesses of scientifically illiterate people—that is simply an incidental outcome of the facts they revealed. Nevertheless, it remains a fact. The Bible presents a timeline and an account of the origin of species that are wholly inconsistent with the known facts.

To be fair to the original authors, they probably never intended to mislead scientifically illiterate people thousands of years later. As they devised origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge of the world, they could hardly have imagined that someone would one day write their tales down, combine them with other implausible myths, genealogies, and morality stories designed to spread fear and enhance priestly power, and then declare the compilation to be the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god. That declaration, of course, reinforced the text’s usefulness as a source of excuses for actions such as land theft, genocide, and enslavement—atrocities conveniently blamed on a god to absolve perpetrators of personal responsibility.

Refuting Creationism - What An Extinct Duck Tells Us About Evolution

An artist’s depiction of the Rēkohu shelduck.

Credit: Sasha Votyakova/Te Papa, CC BY-ND

The Paradise shelduck, Tadorna variegata, the closest relative of the Rēkohu shelduck

The discovery of an extinct shelduck highlights the rich ancient biodiversity of the remote Rēkohu Chatham Islands

Remote islands are the sort of environment biologists might dream up if asked to design a natural laboratory for testing evolution. It’s no coincidence that Darwin was inspired to develop his theory while visiting the Galápagos Islands and noticing how the finches had adapted in different ways to the conditions on each island.

Another striking example comes from the Rēkohu Chatham Islands, about 785 kilometres east of mainland Aotearoa New Zealand. The islands rose in their present form around 3.5 million years ago, effectively resetting the clock for the ecosystems that would develop there. Species arriving from elsewhere had to make do with what traits they already carried, and only those suited to island life survived. Most new arrivals were birds, insects, or wind-blown plants carried there by chance. With few predators and limited competition, these colonists had the perfect opportunity to go their own evolutionary way.

Refuting Creationism - A Human And An Australopithecine Co-Existed - 2.7 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Arrowsmith (left) and ASU Associate Professor Christopher Campisano examine the geology near the Asboli Homo teeth site

Photo by Virginia Commonwealth University Professor Amy Rector

ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor | ASU News

It is generally accepted by palaeoanthropologists that the genus Homo evolved from an Australopithecus species somewhere in East Africa, most likely in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen “Lucy” was found. However, it is now widely recognised that the hominin evolutionary tree was far from straightforward, resembling more a tangled bush with side-branches that went extinct, rather than a simple, linear progression.

Given the tendency of our ancestors to diversify and occasionally interbreed, it is entirely possible that the genus Homo emerged from a hybrid population, or even that early Homo back-bred with ancestral australopithecines — especially when two or more species lived in close proximity, as new evidence suggests they did in the Afar region.

Maps showing (left) the location of the Ledi-Geraru site within the Horn of Africa on the left, and the location of the Australopithecus and Homo teeth on the right

Images by Penn State Associate Research Professor Erin DiMaggio.

Fossils of a previously unknown Australopithecus species and of early Homo have been found in the same area, apparently coexisting. The newly discovered australopithecine is known only from teeth, and there is currently insufficient information to formally name the species. Teeth are often distinctive enough to indicate a previously unrecognised species, but palaeoanthropologists usually require additional skeletal remains — such as jaws, skulls, or postcranial bones — to confirm unique anatomical features and avoid naming a species prematurely.

Of course, because evolution operates over entire populations and across thousands of years, the distinction between the immediately ancestral Australopithecus and the descendant Homo is inherently arbitrary. It likely means far more to modern palaeoanthropologists than it ever did to the hominins themselves.

This new evidence, discovered by an international team working on The Ledi-Geraru Research Project, led by scientists at Arizona State University, indicates that both the unidentified Australopithecus and early Homo lived in the area between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The age estimates were reliably established using volcanic ash layers immediately above and below the fossil-bearing strata. The team’s findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

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

View of the Grand Canyon from the Colorado River.

Jason Muhlbauer

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Another Plethora of Transitional Fossils - From 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

iv> Fresh fossil finds in Africa shed light on the era before Earth’s largest mass extinction | UW News

An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the late Permian in the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. The scene includes several saber-toothed gorgonopsians and beaked dicynodonts.

Gabriel Ugueto

Another day, and another clutch of transitional fossils from millions of years before “Creation Week” for creationists to lie about, misrepresent, or simply ignore in order to cope with the resulting cognitive dissonance. This time, it’s not just a single research paper, but a series of 14 published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The fossils are the result of 15 years of excavation at three sites in Africa and cover the 47-million-year Permian era, which ended with the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — the mass extinction at the end of the Permian in which an estimated 70% of species became extinct. Not only is that timeline fatal to those creationists who like to imagine the Earth and life on it are just 6,000 to 10,000 years old, but the fact of a mass extinction raises insurmountable problems for intelligent design advocates. They would need to explain the intelligence behind designing species only to have them wiped out by a climate catastrophe — one which should have been anticipated by an omniscient designer and could have been prevented by an omnipotent god.

And of course, another problem for creationists is the abundance of these transitional fossils, which, according to creationist dogma, should not exist at all.

Refuting Creationism - Science Fills A Whale Of A Gap - No Gods Found

Janjucetus dullardi calf and mother swimming through the shallow seas off Victoria, 25 million years ago.

Art by Ruairidh Duncan

A cornucopia of tiny, bizarre whales used to live in Australian waters – here’s one of them - Museums Victoria

My last blog post concluded with:

Science moves forward by explaining these transitions; creationism survives only by ignoring them. With each gap that closes, their god has less room to hide, and the story of life becomes clearer without invoking the supernatural.

So, the prediction that more gap-closing transitional fossils would soon be found was hardly a bold one.

And sure enough, along comes just such a paper. To rub salt in creationists’ wounds, like the subject of my previous blog post on transitional penguin fossils, this one is also published by Oxford University Press in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London—the society to which Darwin and Wallace presented their ground-breaking 1858 papers On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, or, to put it another way, On the Origin of Species.

This new paper fills an important gap in the evolution of whales. It was written by Erich Fitzgerald of Museums Victoria Research Institute, Ruairidh Duncan of Monash University, Victoria, Australia, and colleagues. The discovery and its significance are explained in an article in The Conversation by Erich Fitzgerald and Ruairidh Duncan. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, a brief background on the evolution of whales:

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

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

Canterbury Museum and Tom Simpson, CC BY-SA

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

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

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

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

First, some background information on the Waipara Greensand Formation:

Refuting Creationism - Ancestors Of Mammals Lived 40 Million Years Earlier Than We Thought.

Using a tooth, researchers have identified the oldest known species of docodont, the ancestor of mammals.

Illustration by Pedro Andrade

Docodontids in their natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT)

Nova FCT student identified a new ancestor of mammals from a two-millimeter tooth

A student palaeontologist, Sofia Patrocínio, from the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Lisbon (Nova FCT), has identified a fossil tooth as belonging to a docodontan – a group of mammaliform vertebrates considered close relatives and ancestors of true mammals. This discovery pushes back the known origin of this group by a further 40 million years.

This is the sort of find that often prompts headlines seemingly designed to play into the hands of anti-science groups such as creationists, with claims like *“The science books will need to be rewritten”* or *“Everything you thought you knew about evolution was wrong!”* These sensationalist lines risk creating the false impression that scientists are constantly realising they were “wrong all along”.

In reality – as in this case – what has happened is that a gap in our knowledge has been filled. Our understanding is now slightly more complete than before. Rather than overturning evolutionary theory, this discovery fits perfectly within it, supporting what was already known: there was a gradual transition from small reptiles to early mammals. The main uncertainty was *when* certain steps in that transition occurred.

Creationists who seize on such discoveries to claim scientists are forever changing their minds overlook an inconvenient detail – the timeline. Nearly all of these fossil finds involve organisms that lived hundreds of thousands, even millions of years before creationists believe the Earth and life began. If anything needs rewriting, it’s the creationist books that peddle disinformation to those willing to pay for material that reassures them their preconceived beliefs are correct – even when the evidence says otherwise.

Sofia Patrocínio and her colleagues have recently published their findings in the journal of the Palaeontological Association, Papers in Palaeontology. The discovery is also covered in a news article from Nova FCT, published in Almadense.

What Were Docodontans? Docodontans were small, extinct mammaliforms that lived during the Jurassic period, between about 201 and 145 million years ago. Although not true mammals, they were close relatives and part of the larger group from which mammals evolved.

They are best known from their distinctive teeth, which had complex cusps adapted for an omnivorous diet of insects, plants, and other small food sources. Fossils suggest docodontans were shrew-like in size and appearance, with some adapted to specialised habitats – including burrowing, climbing, and even semi-aquatic lifestyles.

The group is important to palaeontologists because their anatomy preserves key stages in the evolution from reptile-like synapsids to the first true mammals. Discoveries like the one by Sofia Patrocínio help refine our understanding of when and how early mammal traits emerged.

Nova FCT student identified a new ancestor of mammals from a two-millimeter tooth

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The fossil measures less than seven millimeters in total and is partially hidden in a rock. However, meticulous work has identified a new species that combines the name of a goddess with that of a constellation. The new species pushes back the emergence of this group of animals by 40 million years.

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After several years of researching a molar tooth from an animal that might resemble a mouse and several months until she was able to publish the scientific article, Sofia Patrocínio "closed" this cycle on Friday, June 13, 2025. The result presented in the scientific journal Papers in Palaeontology owes nothing to bad luck, but it does have its share of incidents, as the paleontologist told ALMADENSE.

"There's a funny story from high school: I had to do a project on paleontology and got a failing grade; I was so upset I said it wouldn't happen again," she says in a relaxed conversation, while admitting that she loves what she does. And she does a lot of things, even though many of them aren't even paid. "Paleontology isn't seen as a serious profession." Something she's determined to change.

Sofia Patrocínio is from Cartaxo and graduated in Environmental Education and Nature Tourism. It's been more than half a dozen years since she enrolled in the program, but the price of student housing elsewhere was unaffordable (then, as it is now) , and it was one of the factors that forced her to stay closer to home and enroll at the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém. After that, she interned at Dino Parque da Lourinhã and stayed on to work there.

It was impossible to remove the fossil from the rock due to the risk of damaging it. In the center of the image, the yellowish structure corresponds to the dentary (mandible), and the dark structure is the partially visible molar.

Photo: Sofia Patrocínio

“It was them [my colleagues at Dino Parque] who encouraged me to do a master's degree in Paleontology at Nova; they said I had a knack for it,” he says, referring to the course at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Lisbon (Nova FCT), which has a campus in the parish of Caparica, Almada.

In one of her master's degree courses, Vertebrate Paleontology, Sofia Patrocínio and her colleagues were challenged to prepare and describe fossils, some from the Lourinhã Museum collection and some from an excavation in Greenland. The then-master's student worked with needles and a microscope to remove the sediments still clinging to the fossil, which was less than seven millimeters long —even so, she was unable to free the entire piece, as we will see.

She then described the fossil in detail and attempted to identify its group and its phylogenetic relationships with other animal groups—in other words, she attempted to place the animal in its proper position on the tree of life. "It had similarities with several groups, but didn't seem to belong to any. It was most likely a new species," says the researcher. "I had so much study material that I could have continued [with the same topic] for my master's degree."

How does a tooth allow us to identify a new species?

The first step was to include the species in the order Docodonta, a group of mammaliforms—the evolutionary predecessors of mammals—with very distinctive molars. To put it simply, the molars were long and low, with a characteristic cusp pattern. (Cusps are the conical protrusions on molars, which we also have.) But this particular tooth had characteristics that didn't fit into any of the previously known genera or species within docodonts.

Docodont fossils are very rare, but there are fossils with entire jaws, which allowed comparison with the available material and ruled out a tooth with a small defect. "If it were just a change in the tooth's morphology, there might be doubt, but I counted five to seven differences," explains Sofia Patrocínio. Among these differences was a cusp facing the tongue.

While the tooth's original pattern allowed it to be classified as a new species, the layer in which it was found offers another new discovery. To determine the age of fossils, paleontologists "measure" the age of rocks found in the same layer. In this case, the fossil would have formed about 200 million years ago, during the transition between the Triassic and Jurassic periods (the period in which a wide variety of easily recognizable dinosaurs emerged). Even more interesting is that this species would have appeared 40 million years before the oldest known docodont species.

A new species at the transition between pre-docodont mammals and docodonts adds another piece to the puzzle of mammalian evolution, particularly the order Docodonta, which diversified and occupied various environments at the same time as large dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Furthermore, this fossil places the origin of docodonts in Greenland and Europe—connected before the continents separated into their current positions—rather than Russia and Asia as previously thought.

The layers of soil containing the fossils are like shelves in a bookcase, each corresponding to a period of time. By exploring each shelf as if reading the books stored there, the scientists were able to date the layer and the fossils—among them a new species of dinosaur, Plateosaurus trossingensis, identified by a fellow student in Sofia's master's program — and also describe the environment. The fossils were found in an ancient lake, with little oxygen in the water and which served as a passageway for many animals.

200 million years ago, when the 'Nujalikodon cassiopeiae' fossil is believed to have formed, what are now Greenland and Europe were connected, and also in contact with the continental plates of North America and Asia.

Adapted from: Patrocínio et al. (2025) Papers in Paleontology

A goddess tooth named after a constellation

Now 25, Sofia Patrocínio boasts the identification of a new species on her resume. "It's strange; it seems like it hasn't sunk in yet." Whoever discovers a new species can give it a name, naturally following the rules used by the scientific community. A species always has two Latin names (first the genus name, which functions almost like our surnames, and then the "proper name" that conveys the distinctive characteristic), as defined by the scientist Carlos Linnaeus in the mid-18th century.

This new docodont was named Nujalikodon cassiopeiae . Nujalik is the goddess of the earth hunt in Inuit mythology—the indigenous population of the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland—and "nujalikodon" means "Nujalik's tooth." The specific epithet cassiopeiae owes its name to the constellation Cassiopeia, whose five stars appear to form a W, like the cusps of the molar Sofia Patrocínio studied.

The 831 photographs taken by the scan allowed a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fossil measuring just seven millimeters.

Adapted from Patrocínio et al. (2025) Papers in Paleontology

Naming the species requires all the prior work of studying fossils, in this case a complete molar, the piece of bone that housed the tooth, and the broken roots of a second tooth. But a large portion of the fossil was not visible; it was still embedded within the rock, and removing it could irreparably damage the tooth. Furthermore, it was extremely small, the molar measuring only two millimeters. Therefore, a scan of the fossil was necessary—a kind of CT scan for very small objects—which was very difficult to achieve, says the researcher. "But without the scan, it was impossible to move forward, nor to submit the article for publication." Then, using the 831 photographs from the scan—as if the fossil had been cut into very thin slices—a three-dimensional model was created on the computer, allowing us to see the details hidden within the rock.

Sofia Patrocínio's work was supported by her advisors, Vicente Crespo, a paleontologist at Nova FCT, and Elsa Panciroli, a researcher at the National Museum of Scotland, and involved collaboration with other researchers. The work was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, as part of the GeoBioTec project.

Having completed this stage, the paleontologist hopes to continue studying the evolution of mammalian ancestors with a doctorate from the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon. This time, she will study the inner ear—but she will continue to observe bones and very small structures. In the meantime, she will participate in paleontological excavations, collaborate with a fossil database in Portugal, and, in the activities she organizes for Ciência Viva, try to spark children's interest in paleontology.

Publication:

Patrocínio, S., Panciroli, E., Rotatori, F.M., Mateus, O., Milàn, J., Clemmensen, L.B. and Crespo, V.D. (2025)
The oldest definitive docodontan from central East Greenland sheds light on the origin of the clade. Pap Palaeontol, 11: e70022. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.70022

ABSTRACT
The first mammaliaforms emerged in the Late Triassic, but their exact origins remain unclear due to the scarcity of fossils from this period. One of the earliest diverging mammaliaform groups, the order Docodonta, became unusually ecomorphologically diverse compared with other early mammals, and this may be connected to the possession of complex molar cusp morphology. The specimen described here, found in the Rhætelv Formation of the Kap Stewart Group (Rhaetian–Sinemurian) of central East Greenland, provides novel information on docodontan origins and evolution, as well as key biogeographic insights into early mammal dispersal. Nujalikodon cassiopeiae gen. et sp. nov. is the first mammaliaform found in the Rhætelv Formation, and is likely to be Early Jurassic (Hettangian) in age. Comprising an incomplete dentary with a single preserved molar, it was visualized using micro-computed tomography; the molar bears similarities to the putative early docodontan Delsatia, and docodontan Dobunnodon. Phylogenetic analysis places Nujalikodon cassiopeiae as a basal member of Docodonta or a close sister taxon, making it one of the oldest definitive docodontans and pushing the origin of the group back to at least the Early Jurassic. It provides insights into the development of docodontan dental complexity, a key factor in their ecological diversification during the Middle to Late Jurassic. Its presence in Greenland supports the hypothesis that docodontans originated in the region now comprising Europe and Greenland before dispersing across the rest of Laurasia.

Patrocínio, S., Panciroli, E., Rotatori, F.M., Mateus, O., Milàn, J., Clemmensen, L.B. and Crespo, V.D. (2025)
The oldest definitive docodontan from central East Greenland sheds light on the origin of the clade. Pap Palaeontol, 11: e70022. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.70022

© 2025 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This fossil tooth extends the known existence of docodontans by around 40 million years, placing them much earlier in the evolutionary timeline than previously documented. This is significant because:

• It strengthens the fossil record for the transition from reptile-like synapsids to early mammals, filling a critical gap rather than overturning existing theory.
• It confirms evolutionary predictions — that mammaliforms had already diversified long before the rise of true mammals, in line with phylogenetic models.
• It demonstrates the self-correcting nature of science — evidence leads to refinements in understanding, not wholesale abandonment of established frameworks. When the evidence changes, scientists change their minds, unlike theologians who try to change the evidence.

For creationism, the problem is twofold: the fossil is tens of millions of years older than the 6,000–10,000-year timeline central to young-Earth creationist belief, and docodontans are transitional, exhibiting a mosaic of traits bridging reptiles and mammals, exactly the kind of “missing links” creationists claim do not exist.

Rather than undermining evolution, this discovery is yet another piece of independent evidence that fits perfectly into its framework — and yet another reminder that creationist models fail when confronted with reality.

Refuting Creationism - Adapting to Climate Change - 56 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ancient soils preserved in the rock, known as paleosols, in the Willwood Formation, Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, are rich fossil sites.

Fossil studies of the extinct predator Dissacus praenuntius offer clues as to how ancient animals responded to environmental changes. The ancient omnivore was about the size of a jackal or a coyote.

ДиБгд, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

An Ancient Predator’s Shift in Diet Offers Clues on Surviving Climate Change | Rutgers University

Long before the supposed "Creation Week" — when creationists claim Earth was magicked into existence just a few thousand years ago — our planet was already teeming with life and undergoing dramatic changes. Around 56 million years ago, a mere tick in geological time, Earth experienced a sharp and rapid rise in global temperatures known as the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This event had a profound effect on ecosystems and the species that lived through it. Many, of course, did not survive, but those that did, adapted to the new, harsher conditions.

One such survivor was an early mammal, Dissacus praenuntius, a member of the now-extinct Mesonychidae order. D. praenuntius was an omnivore that resembled a hyena, but with small hooves on each toe, and like a hyena, it likely lived as an opportunistic scavenger and predator. Now, a team of palaeontologists has revealed how its behaviour changed during the PETM: it began consuming more bone, presumably because its usual prey had become scarce or disappeared altogether. In this respect, D. praenuntius serves as a record of the environmental pressures of the PETM and how some species responded to survive.

It paints a picture of an Earth that is far removed from the idealised, "perfect" planet imagined in creationist mythology — a planet supposedly fine-tuned for life. Instead, the fossil record tells the story of a world that can quickly become hostile, where survival depends not on divine design but on the ability to adapt — or perish.

Creationism Crushed - By Big Biting Dinosaurs

Dinosaur bite illustrations.

Rowe and Rayfield, Current Biology (2025)

Gigantic, meat-eating dinosaurs didn’t all have strong bites | EurekAlert!

Creationists will likely dismiss the recent paper in Current Biology because, as is common in creationist psychology, any scientific evidence contradicting their fundamental beliefs is either ignored, misrepresented, or actively denied—particularly if it suggests their views should be reconsidered.

The study by Andre J. Rowe and Emily J. Rayfield of the University of Bristol (UK) demonstrates that, during the long stretch of Earth’s history predating creationist timelines, giant carnivorous dinosaurs evolved markedly different jaw mechanics to tackle prey—leading to distinct ecological roles. For example, crushers such as Tyrannosaurus rex developed jaws optimised for forceful crushing, akin to crocodilians, whereas slashers - other large theropods such as allosaurids or spinosaurs - developed weaker jaws tailored to ripping and slashing flesh, like modern Komodo dragons [1.1].

This divergence in feeding mechanics underscores a fundamental principle in evolutionary biology: adaptive radiation and allopatric speciation — whereby offspring inheriting intermediate jaw characteristics (neither fully adapted for crushing nor ripping) would likely be at a disadvantage, reducing their reproductive success. Over time, this selective pressure fosters reproductive barriers and drives lineages apart.

Creationism Refuted - What Caused Our Teeth To Shrink Until 690,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Chronologically from left, the molars of human ancestors got longer over millennia to suit a diet of high-carb grassy plants.

Photo credits: Public domain; Don Hitchcock; Fernando Losada Rodríguez (rotated)

Changes in Diet Drove Physical Evolution in Early Humans | Dartmouth

A recent discovery by palaeoanthropologists, led by researchers from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, highlights the stark difference between how a teleological thinker—such as a creationist—imagines evolution works and how it actually proceeds. The study found that the teeth of ancient hominins evolved over a period of some 700,000 years in response to the increasing availability of soft, starchy foods, which began to replace the coarse, fibrous plant matter they had previously consumed.

A teleological thinker—someone who sees purpose and agency in natural processes—would assume that something *caused* the teeth to evolve in order to better process the new food. However, as the theory of evolution predicts, any variation that improves efficiency in food processing or reduces the now-unnecessary cost of growing and maintaining large teeth will be favoured by natural selection. Over evolutionary time, such traits become more common. In the case of archaic hominins, this meant their teeth gradually became smaller.

Teleological thinkers often make the mistake of believing that asking, "Who or what told the teeth they needed to change?" or "How did the teeth know they had to evolve?" is a meaningful challenge to evolutionary theory. To them, it seems reasonable to assume a supernatural intelligence must be involved.

This simplistic view of evolution is actively encouraged by creationist pseudo-scientists such as William A. Dembski and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, who claim that the genetic information resulting from such optimisation must have been intelligently designed because it is "specified" for a purpose. Of course, at every stage of human evolution, the genetic information that produced a particular tooth shape was necessarily "specified" for that outcome. Dembski never discloses this to his audience, nor does he attempt to correct the teleological bias on which his movement depends.

An interesting aspect of this discovery is that the evolutionary change in this case was driven not so much by environmental change - the starch foods had always been there - as by a change in behaviour - a case of meme-gene co-evolution, using the term 'meme' in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, to mean a unit of cultural inheritance - the analogue of the gene in genetic inheritance.

Refuting Creationism - A Diverse Human Population in China - 290,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Members of the research team.

A study reveals the human diversity in China during Middle Pleistocene | CENIEH

A study recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports the discovery of a mixture of archaic and modern traits in the dentition of 300,000-year-old hominin fossils unearthed at the Hualongdong site in Anhui Province, China.

These fossils predate the migration of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) out of Africa by around 250,000 years. They indicate that hominin populations in East Asia were already diversifying and possibly interbreeding with archaic humans, such as Homo erectus, to form lineages distinct from both Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The research, led by Professor Wu Xiujie, director of the Hualongdong excavations, is the result of a longstanding collaboration between scientists from the Dental Anthropology Group at CENIEH — María Martinón-Torres, Director of CENIEH and corresponding author of the paper, and José María Bermúdez de Castro, researcher ad honorem at CENIEH — and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing.

The findings reveal a rich and complex picture of human evolution in East Asia, wholly at odds with the simplistic biblical narrative still clung to by creationists. That account, written by ancient people with no knowledge of the broader world, reflects a worldview in which Earth was small, flat, covered by a dome, and located at the centre of the universe.

Refuting Creationism - Our Ancestors Evolved To Walk Upright In Trees - Like Modern Savannah Chimpanzees

A young male chimp feeds on woodland seeds (cropped).

Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)

How much time did our ancestors spend up trees? Studying these chimpanzees might help us find out

A group of Issa Valley chimpanzees navigate an open woodland crown to forage on new leaves.

Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)

A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution delivers yet more evidence for the Theory of Evolution and decisively contradicts Bible-literalist creationism. By closely studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Issa Valley—an environment that mirrors the mixed woodland–savannah habitats of our early ancestors—researchers found that these apes still spend most of their time in trees and conduct over 85 % of their bipedal movements arboreally. This finding strongly supports the evolutionary view that human bipedalism did not emerge from a sudden exodus from trees but evolved gradually while our ancestors still relied heavily on arboreal habitats.

What is particularly striking is the complete absence of any doubt among the scientists that evolution, driven by natural selection, is the correct framework for interpreting these observations. At no point do they resort to supernatural explanations or even hint that evolution might be insufficient to explain the data. On the contrary, their conclusions seamlessly integrate with the existing evolutionary narrative, demonstrating how behaviours seen in modern chimpanzees provide a living window into the adaptations of our shared ancestors. This directly undermines the creationist claim that mainstream biologists are “abandoning” evolution in favour of unproven religious explanations—a claim that has no basis in reality.

Creationist dogma insists on static, unchanging “kinds” and appeals to unverifiable supernatural causes. Yet, studies like this show that every aspect of our evolutionary past—anatomical, genetic, and behavioural—can be explained through natural processes, without the need for divine intervention. The evidence for a shared ancestry between humans and other primates grows with every new study, while creationism remains stuck with no predictive power and no scientific methodology.

In short, this research reinforces the power and universality of the Theory of Evolution. The scientists involved didn’t set out to “disprove creationism”; they simply applied rigorous observation and analysis, and the results—once again—fell squarely on the side of evolution. Far from being abandoned, the ToE continues to thrive as the backbone of modern biology, while creationism, with its untestable supernatural entities, offers no explanation at all.

Creationism Refuted - How Neanderthals Were Getting Fat - 125,000 before 'Creation Week'

Neanderthals smashing bones to extract the fat

AI generated image (ChatGPT 4o)

Excavation at the Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany.

Photo: Professor Wil Roebroeks, Leiden University

125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany - Leiden University
More evidence has emerged that Neanderthals were far from the slow-witted, lumbering brutes of popular myth. In fact, they were highly organised, culturally sophisticated, and capable of processing food on what can only be described as an industrial scale.

This latest insight comes from a team of archaeologists led by researchers from MONREPOS (Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in collaboration with the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.

At a site known as Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years, the researchers have discovered compelling evidence of a bone-processing ‘factory’. Here, Neanderthals systematically broke up the massive bones of straight-tusked elephants and other large mammals—including deer, horses, and aurochs—to extract fat from the marrow by steeping the fragments in hot water. The straight-tusked elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tonnes, would have yielded enough meat to feed 2,000 adult humans their daily caloric needs.

This site predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of thousands of years, placing it firmly within the Neanderthal era. At the time, Europe was enjoying an interglacial period with a climate comparable to today's.