Refuting Creationism - Holy Sea Cow! A 20-Million-Year-Old Fossil Dugong From Arabia!

An artistic reconstruction of a herd of ancient sea cows foraging on the seafloor

Alex Boersma

Fossils of Salwasiren qatarensis, a newly described 21-million-year-old ancient sea cow species found in Al Maszhabiya [AL mahz-HA-bee-yah], a fossil site in southwestern Qatar.

Photo by James Di Loreto, Smithsonian.

Ancient Manatee Relative Reveals That Sea Cows Have Engineered the Arabian Gulf’s Seagrass Ecosystems for Over 20 Million Years | Smithsonian Institution

Scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, together with collaborators at Qatar Museums, have just announced the discovery of 20-million-year-old fossils of a sea cow that was a miniature version of living dugongs, and which almost certainly lived in the same seagrass meadows as modern dugongs.

The scientists have published their findings in the journal PeerJ.

If there is one thing that has creationists scraping the bottom of their barrel for reasons to dismiss evidence, it is news of fossils that are tens of millions of years older than they believe the universe is — simply because Bronze Age authors of their favourite source book, the Bible, said so.

In their determination to show the world that nothing can make them change their belief in the demonstrably absurd, creationists will resort to false accusations of lying against scientists, claim they are incompetent, or insist that they used dating methods they claim (incorrectly) to have been proven false, all in an attempt to preserve their beliefs. It is as though they imagine the entire global scientific community, and all the research institutions within it, exist solely to disprove the Bible in order to make creationists change their minds.

For rational people without such an egocentric view of the world, however, discoveries such as these miniature dugongs help to paint a fascinating picture of how species — and the ecosystems of which they are a part — have evolved over time. The fossils were found about 10 miles from a bay of seagrass that is prime habitat for modern dugongs.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Life Evolved Almost a Billion Years Earlier That We Thought

December: Complex life developed earlier than previously thought, new study reveals | News and features | University of Bristol

Research led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature a few days ago suggests that the transition from simple prokaryote cells to complex eukaryote cells began almost 2.9 billion years ago – nearly a billion years earlier than some previous estimates. Prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea — had been the dominant, indeed the only, life forms for the preceding 1.1 billion years, having arisen about 300 million years after Earth coalesced 4 billion years ago.

Creationists commonly forget that for the first billion or more years of life on Earth, it consisted solely of single-celled prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea. They routinely post nonsense on social media about the supposed impossibility of a complex cell spontaneously assembling from ‘non-living’ atoms — something no serious evolutionary biologist has ever proposed as an explanation for the origin of eukaryote cells.

There is now little doubt among biologists that complex eukaryote cells arose through endosymbiotic relationships between archaea and bacteria, which may have begun as parasitic or predator–prey interactions before evolving into symbioses as the endpoint of evolutionary arms races. The only questions concern when exactly eukaryote cells first began to emerge, and what triggered their evolution.

The team collected sequence data from hundreds of species and, combined with fossil evidence, reconstructed a time-resolved tree of life. They then used this framework to resolve the timing of historical events across hundreds of gene families, focusing on those that distinguish prokaryotes from eukaryotes.

One surprising finding was that mitochondria were late to the party, arising only as atmospheric oxygen levels increased for the first time — linking early evolutionary biology to Earth’s geochemical history.

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

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

Credit: Nathan Dehaut – Artwork / MUVP – Scientific supervision

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - 'Lucy' Had a Cousin Species Who Lived Alongside Her

The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position.

Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU

New research by ASU paleoanthropologists: 2 ancient human ancestors were neighbors | ASU News.

According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.

However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.

The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.

Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.

This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.

For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.

Creationism Refuted - 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth RNA

One of Yuka’s legs, illustrating the exceptional preservation of the lower part of the leg after the skin had been removed, which enabled recovery of ancient RNA molecules.

Photo: Valeri Plotnikov.

The world’s oldest RNA extracted from woolly mammoth - Stockholm University

Scientists led by researchers from Stockholm University, Denmark, have just announced that they have successfully extracted RNA from 40,000-year-old mammoth remains — the oldest RNA ever obtained. This shows that not only DNA but also RNA can persist for extraordinary lengths of time under the right conditions, adding yet more to the mountain of evidence that undermines creationist claims. With preserved RNA, researchers can even reconstruct the DNA that originally served as its template, effectively giving scientists two independent avenues for recovering genetic information.

One of the joys of debunking creationism — a childish superstition when set beside the rigour of evolutionary biology — is the sheer abundance of evidence. Almost every peer-reviewed paper in biology, geology, palaeontology, cosmology, and the other natural sciences demonstrates, in one way or another, the reality of evolution and the age of the Earth, and presents verifiable results that creationism simply cannot accommodate.

Even psychology lends its weight. Not only does it support an evolutionary account of human cognition and intelligence, but it also helps explain why creationists cling so tightly to demonstrably false beliefs. For many, rejecting evidence becomes a test of loyalty or personal strength, with scientific data treated as part of a supposed conspiracy designed to shake their faith. If they can cling to their faith despite the overwhelming contrary evidence, then they must really believe it.

Adding this new discovery to the existing evidence is rather like tossing a pebble onto Mount Everest and expecting creationists to accept the mountain’s existence because a pebble lies on it. Such acceptance is impossible for the committed creationist, since that would mean yielding to the ‘evil conspiracy’ and admitting that their favourite holy book is not a perfect, divinely authored scientific text, but a compilation of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mythology, created by people doing their best to explain a world they did not yet understand.

Creationism Refuted - Doggy Dos For Creationists

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the second article in The Conversation which incidentally refutes creationism and shows us why the Bible must be dismissed as a source book for science and history on the basis that, when compared to reality, it's stories are not just wrong; they're not even close.

This one deals with essentially that same subject as my last past - the evolution of all the different dog varieties since wolves were first domesticated some 11,000 years ago. Together with all the other canids that creationists insist are all dog 'kind', including several foxes, several subspecies of wolf, coyotes, jackals, and African wild dogs, the hundreds of different recognised breeds of dog could not conceivably have arisen from a single pair and the resulting genetic bottleneck just a few thousand years ago. Moreover, we are expected to believe that in that short space of time, all the canids evolved from being vegetarian (with canine teeth, meat-cutting incisors and bone-crushing molars, apparently) to being obligate carnivores.

As well as the paper that was the subject of my last blog post, this The Conversation article mentions another paper, also published in Science by palaeontologists led by Shao-Jie Zhang from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China. This paper draws on DNA evidence from ancient Eastern Eurasian dogs.

The article by Kylie M. Cairns, a Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney, Australia and Professor Melanie Fillios of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, University of New England, USA. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Cambrian Fossils Confirm The Bible Is Wrong.

Salterella in longitudinal section, showing biomineralized outer shell (blue arrow), agglutinated material (red arrow) and the boundary between the agglutinated layer and the shell near the apex (white arrows),

Vayda PJ, Xiao S, Keller ND, et al. (2025)

Interbedded fine-grained clastic and carbonate strata of the lower Illtyd Formation, Wind River, Yukon, Canada, that locally contain Salterella.

A skeleton and a shell? Ancient fossil finally finds home on the tree of life | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

As though fossils from half a billion years before their mythical “Creation Week” weren’t awkward enough for creationists, this latest find slips neatly into the tree of life and closes a small but meaningful gap in our understanding of how protective shells evolved. In doing so, it undermines more creationist claims than they might care to consider.

A research team led by Prescott J. Vayda of Virginia Tech has shown that the enigmatic fossils Volborthella and Salterella, long puzzling palaeontologists, are in fact early cnidarians — members of the group that includes corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones. These organisms are united by their stinging cells, which they use to subdue prey. Even more troublesome for creationists, the structure of the earlier Volborthella shell strongly suggests a transitional relationship with the more complex shell of Salterella, hinting at an evolutionary sequence between the two.

The team’s findings have just been published in the Journal of Paleontology.

The Cambrian period was defined by the emergence of mobility and, with it, true predation. These new ecological dynamics sparked evolutionary “arms races”, driving rapid diversification in both offensive and defensive strategies: sensory structures, spines, shells, and behaviours such as burrowing. These early cnidarians provide an important glimpse into how some of the earliest protective shells came to be.

Such evolutionary arms races also offer yet another reason to dismiss the notion of an intelligent designer. No competent designer would turn yesterday’s solution into today’s problem — yet that is precisely what we see in nature, where improvements in predators prompt improvements in prey, and vice versa. It’s exactly what one would expect from an unguided evolutionary process with no foresight, driven solely by differential survival and reproduction.

Refuting Creationism - 300,000 Years Of Stone Technology In Africa - Over 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.

a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.⁹⁶); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)^11,74,97,98 d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology^3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).

Braun, D.R., Palcu Rolier, D.V., Advokaat, E.L. et al (2025)

Stone Tools Through Generations: 300,000 Years of Human Technology | Media Relations | The George Washington University

The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.

How Science Works - Expanding Our Knowledge of Coelacanth Evolution.

Reconstruction of a large mawsoniid coelacanth from the British Rhaetian.

Artist credit: Daniel Phillips

[Body]

Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae

Fraser, Michael D.; Henderson, Bruce A.S., et al (2020). CC BY 4.0, Link

Ancient fish was hiding in plain sight hundreds of years after its believed extinction, study shows - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A recent re-examination of museum coelacanth fossils has shown that there was more than one taxon in the Late Triassic and that, where we believed there were just four specimens, there are actually more than fifty. These fossils were hiding in plain sight, mis-identified for decades in collections across Britain. This significantly expands the known diversity of coelacanths at that time and neatly illustrates how science continually refines and improves its understanding as new evidence and careful re-analysis emerge.

Coelacanths have long been a favourite talking-point for creationists, who seized on the 1938 discovery of living Latimeria — a lineage once known only from the fossil record and thought extinct — as supposed proof that evolution had somehow stalled. Because the modern species still carries the name “coelacanth”, they leap to the assumption that the fish has remained unchanged for over 200 million years, and therefore evolution must be false. I have even seen creationists claim that if coelacanths have “not evolved” in all that time, the Earth must therefore be only a few thousand years old. It’s an extraordinary logical contortion — and one born of misunderstanding both biology and evidence.

In reality, the modern coelacanth is not the same species as the ancient Triassic forms, nor is evolutionary change required to be dramatic or constant for every lineage. Species can remain broadly similar when their ecological niche remains stable — a concept perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. What this study demonstrates, once again, is the iterative, self-correcting nature of science: questions are never closed, evidence is always open to re-examination, and conclusions adapt as new data emerges.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Teeth Show Mixed Origins Of A Transitional Hominin - 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paranthropus robustus

Parathropus robustus (Artist's impression)

Bary Davies, RCA

New clues from 2 million-year-old tooth enamel tell us more about an ancient relative of humans

Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.

If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.

But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.

However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.

And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.

Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Thrived Until Disaster Struck - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Small primitive mammals live alongside a Triceratops, pre-extinction. A softshell turtle climbs up a log, unaware that its freshwater surroundings will shelter it from the asteroid.

Illustration © Henry Sharpe.

Dinosaurs were on the up before asteroid downfall | News | The University of Edinburgh

This, the second paper, published in 2022 that utterly refutes creationism on several different levels, reports evidence that particularly undermines their claim that an omnibenevolent god created a world fine-tuned for life.

This belief arises from a deeply ignorant, rose-tinted view of the world — one that conveniently ignores history and habitually attributes anything bad to something else: sin, free will, or other theological constructs that, by their own narrative, could only have applied after some supposed “fall”.

In reality, even a superficial understanding of Earth’s history — 99.9975 % of which took place before creationism’s legendary “Creation Week” — reveals that the planet is anything but fine-tuned for life. Life on Earth has repeatedly been subjected to mass extinctions triggered by geological and cosmological catastrophes that wreaked havoc on the environment, often at a pace too rapid for most species to adapt.

One of the most famous of these events was the meteor impact in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, 66 million years ago. This strike plunged the planet into a “nuclear winter” as atmospheric dust blotted out the Sun. Within weeks, almost all large species were exterminated, leaving only the avian dinosaurs — likely shielded by insulating feathers — and early mammals, protected by their insulating fur.

But as this recent paper shows, the dinosaurs were thriving in a healthy, biodiverse environment in which they were the dominant species right up until the moment the meteor struck. Had they shared the creationists’ mindset, they might well have concluded that Earth was “fine-tuned” for them too.

The evidence for this comes from an international team of palaeontologists and ecologists, including researchers from University of Oulu (Finland), Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Washington (Seattle, USA), University College London (UK), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (USA), and University of Edinburgh (UK).

Creationism Refuted - Now It's A Transitional Dinosaur - Khankhuuluu The Dragon Prince

An artist's impression of Khankhuuluu mongoliensis

Masato Hattori

An artist's impression of the newly discovered dinosaur

Julius Csotonyi

Paleontologists from the University of Calgary identify closest-known ancestor to Tyrannosaurs | EurekAlert!

Two new papers announced today will have creationists scratching their heads as they try to decide which technique for dismissing them will meet with the most approval from their fellow cultists.

The first, in Nature, concerns yet another of those supposedly non-existent transitional fossils which, because Charles Darwin predicted they would be found, must be dismissed at all costs. It comes in the form of an 86-million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Mongolia that is intermediate between the small, fleet-footed predatory dinosaurs and the larger apex predators — the tyrannosaurs.

The usual creationist response is to declare that these intermediate fossils are “not transitional; they are fully formed, created species.” Of course, that doesn’t explain why species that are intermediate between ancestral and descendant species show a mosaic of features from both. Presumably, given their parody of evolution — in which evolution is imagined as a single event where one species suddenly turns into another — they expect an intermediate to be half one and half the other: the equivalent of the “crocoduck” or a chimpanzee with a human head. In reality, this discovery shows exactly what we would expect from the fossil record of tyrannosaur evolution 86 million years ago.

It's also important to creationism that the so-called 'missing link' stays missing. It is only ever referred to in the singular and refers to some supposed link between apes and humans, and it is definitely not one of the many archaic African hominins. But of course, every fossil is the 'link' or transitional form between its parents and its offspring because evolution is a process, not the parody event of creationism, evolving species form a continuum, and this discovery from Mongolia is no exception.

How Science Works - Biologists Might Need To Rethink A Detail Of Evolutionary Biology

Details of the surface of two sheet-like colonies of the ‘Berenicea’ type: (A) In Hyporosopora dilatata, the colony surface is relatively flat, save for the slightly convex zooids and faint growth lines (Upper Callovian or Lower Oxfordian, Oxford Clay; Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire); and (B) Well-defined transverse ridges cross the colony surface in Rugosopora enstonensis (Bathonian, Hampen Marly Beds; Enstone, Oxfordshire). Scale bars are 500µm.

Source: Bryozoans in the British Jurassic

New Study Reveals Berenicea Zooid Size Reduction Over 200 Million Years Contradicts Cope's Rule----Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery that a group of organisms has, contrary to “Cope’s Rule,” undergone a steady reduction in body size over the past 200 million years is a useful reminder of how science works — and why religion so often falters.

A cornerstone of the scientific method is its willingness to acknowledge error. Real intellectual strength lies not in clinging to discredited beliefs as though doing so were a test of character, but in facing up to mistakes, learning from them, and changing one’s mind. That is how knowledge advances.

Religion, by contrast, remains shackled to the dogmas of its ancient founders. To alter those fundamental beliefs is, in effect, to abandon the religion itself. This is why, while science has sent probes into deep space and placed human beings on the Moon, faith — despite lofty claims of being able to “move mountains” — has yet to lift so much as a feather a millimetre off the ground.

The new finding was just reported in the journal Palaeontology by Associate Professor MA Junye of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and collaborators. They found that Berenicea, a genus of cyclostome bryozoans, has experienced a continuous reduction in zooid size over the past 200 million years. This runs counter to “Cope’s Rule,” which describes a tendency for body size to increase during the evolution of many lineages.

Cope’s Rule was formulated by the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897). There are, of course, well-known exceptions — such as the “island effect,” where animals isolated on small islands often evolve into miniature versions of their mainland relatives — but these are localised adaptations to particular environments. Cope’s Rule, by contrast, applies to long-term, broad-scale evolutionary trends.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Creationism Refuted - How Science Works - A Fossil Fly That Challenged Evolution.

A 150-million-year-old fossil with a singular adaptation may unlock the origin of quironomids | Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC

In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.

In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.

Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.

The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.

Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.

Refuting Creationism - Tracking Dinosaurs In Oxfordshire - 166 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aerial view of the trackway at Dewars Farm Quarry, Oxfordshire

Credit: Richard Butler,
University of Birmingham.

Oxford researchers return to the Jurassic Highway | University of Oxford

Members of the 2025 excavation team

One of the sauropod trackways.

Photos: Emma Nicholls.

Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.

About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.

When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.

The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.

Creationism Refuted - Hippos Lived In The Rhine - More Than 21,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Left mandible fragment of a female hippopotamus from Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim.
Between 46,000 and 48,300 years old.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived at the Upper Rhine in the same time frame as mammoths. In the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen a hippo reconstruction meets a mammoth skeleton.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived in Europe during the last ice age | University of Potsdam!

News that an international research team led by University of Potsdam and Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim, working with Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie, has produced evidence that hippos lived along the Rhine in what is now Germany some 21,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created out of nothing, will probably come as no surprise to creationists.

They are well-practised at living in a world where verifiable evidence repeatedly refutes their beliefs. Over time, they have developed all manner of convoluted mental gymnastics to cope with the resultant cognitive dissonance—secure in the arrogant conviction that their beliefs trump evidence simply because they label them “faith”.

Normal people, of course, tend to have the humility to accept that evidence is the only valid basis for an informed opinion, and that it must therefore take precedence over myths and fairy tales told to them by parents and authority figures with vested cultural interests. The real test of whether a belief is right or wrong is how well it is supported by evidence—not how cleverly the evidence can be ignored.

This discovery extends our knowledge of the extinction timeline of European hippos, previously believed to have disappeared around 115,000 years ago. The new evidence pushes that date forward dramatically, showing that they survived until about 31,000 years ago, at least in that part of Europe. It also clarifies how these European populations were related to the African hippos.

That timeline is not only inconvenient for creationists; it also highlights the parochial nature of the Bible’s authors, who clearly had no knowledge of flora and fauna beyond their narrow Middle Eastern world. Notably, the Bible makes no mention of the African megafauna—hippos, elephants, giraffes, or ostriches, for example. In fact, the latter would have posed a serious problem for their primitive taxonomy, which classified bats as “birds” simply because they could fly. One can only wonder where they might have placed the flightless ostrich.

Creationism Refuted - Time For A Bible Re-Write

A Palaeolithic handaxe with a broken distal end, discovered during the Ayvalık survey

Early humans may have walked from Türkiye to mainland Europe, new groundbreaking research suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.

The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.

This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.

The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.

Creationism Refuted - Inclusions In 112 Million-Year-Old Amber Show A Diverse Ancient Ecosystem

Diptera: Chironomidae

Scientists unearth a 112-million-year-old time capsule filled with ancient insects | ScienceDaily

A rich source of amber from the Genoveva quarry in the Napo Province of Ecuador is revealing information about life in a dense, tropical rainforest 112 million years ago, requiring the most convoluted of mental gymnastics for creationists to ignore or deny. This newly described deposit, part of the Hollín Formation in the Oriente Basin, represents the first Mesozoic amber deposit with preserved insects ever discovered in South America — and one of the largest known anywhere on the former Gondwanan supercontinent.

Unlike rock fossils, where finer detail is often lost through mineralisation and geological processes, amber frequently preserves plant and animal life with exquisite microscopic precision. This makes the Ecuadorian deposit, produced at a time when Gondwana was on the verge of splitting into Africa and South America, a rare and invaluable window into the humid, densely vegetated ecosystem of an equatorial rainforest during the Cretaceous Period.

Amber is the solidified resinous sap of trees — often conifers such as araucariaceans — and can originate from branches, trunks or even roots, preserving both aerial and subterranean organisms. Almost all known amber deposits come from the northern hemisphere, particularly from Eurasia and North America, so this southern hemisphere deposit provides an unprecedented opportunity to study an ancient Gondwanan ecosystem at a crucial time in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The contrast between this rich, 112-million-year-old ecosystem and the simplistic biblical creation myth is as stark as it could be. Even if we had no other fossils, the life forms trapped in this amber — representing at least five insect orders, spider silk, and an abundance of pollen and spores from ferns, cycads, conifers and early angiosperms — would comprehensively refute the notion of a young Earth created in its present form.

Another strength of amber as a fossil medium is that it is always contemporaneous with the bioinclusions it preserves — organisms became trapped while the resin was still liquid — removing the additional uncertainties sometimes introduced when dating fossils embedded in sedimentary matrices.

Refuting Creationism - Rock Art From Arabia - 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

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12,000-year-old monumental camel rock art acted as ancient 'road signs' to water sources - Griffith News

Thousands of years before creationism’s god supposedly decided to create a small, flat planet with a dome over it, centred on a tiny patch of the Middle East, humans were already leaving road signs and directions to water sources carved into rocks in what is now the Arabian desert. These carvings offer a fascinating insight into the region’s prehistoric megafauna—and, of course, all such evidence of early human activity would have been completely obliterated by the biblical genocidal flood, had such an event really occurred as described.

The rock carvings were discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and including scholars from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), University College London, Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and others. Their findings were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago.

At the time, the region that is now arid desert was made habitable by a humid period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when surface water was abundant. Stone tool manufacture from the site shows clear cultural links with Neolithic societies in the Levant—ironically, the very region where the authors of Genesis set most of their imaginative origin myths, apparently oblivious to the deeper history of the area or the existence of earlier human populations beyond their narrow horizons.