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

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

Ai-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

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

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

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

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

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

Unintelligent Design - The DNA In A Developing Brain Gets Broken And Has To Be Repaired - Incompetent Design Or Evolution?

Neurons migrating through dense tissue in the developing brain (green) frequently undergo DNA damage (magenta).

DNA in neurons is damaged and repaired during brain cortex formation | News | Kyoto University iCeMS

Like my last post, this post illustrates how the human body, far from being the perfect design of the omnipotent, omniscient designer creationists would have us believe in, is the result of a utilitarian evolutionary process. Layers of complexity arise, not from divine brilliance, but from evolved solutions to problems created by suboptimal earlier solutions to other problems — which were themselves the result of imperfect evolution.

In the previous post we saw how DNA replication is sufficiently imperfect that it requires mechanisms to repair the resulting DNA damage. However, these repair processes are themselves potentially dangerous and need control systems to maintain a careful balance between too little and too much repair. When this control process fails, it can lead to cancers that mimic those caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

In this post we see how newborn neurons in the developing brain need to squeeze through tight spaces in dense tissue, past other cells and between fibres, in order to reach their final positions and form neural circuits in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices. This process is such a physical struggle that the DNA in these neurons can suffer double-strand breaks and must be repaired quickly to ensure normal brain development. This is the finding of a research team from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, Osaka University, the National University of Singapore and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, led by Professor Mineko Kengaku who have just published their findings in Nature.

Mostly, this repair is quick and successful. However, the research team also found striking similarities between the development of mice in which the repair process failed and human genome-instability syndromes that affect the cerebellum.

Another important point is that this repair process appears to be much more successful in damaged neuronal DNA than in similar damage that can occur when some cancer cells migrate through narrow channels. The difference seems to lie in where the DNA breaks occur. In neurons, they tend to occur in regions of the genome that are not actively being transcribed, whereas in cancer cells the damage can involve essential genes. That suggests there is some biological bias in where these breaks occur in neurons, rather than the process being simply random mechanical shattering.

This raises the obvious question for creationists: why create a process that breaks DNA in developing brain cells, only to require another process to repair it, with the inherent risk that the repair process might be incomplete or imperfect? It also raises the possibility that the resulting small differences in the genomes of individual neurons could contribute to neuronal individuality and perhaps to some neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

The emerging picture, from this and from the rogue repair-control process that can mimic cancers caused by the BRCA genes, is not of a human body designed by an omniscient engineer. It is more like a William Heath Robinson contraption: improvised, overcomplicated, dependent on compensatory mechanisms, and always vulnerable to the failure of the very systems needed to keep it working.

Unintelligent Design - What Happens when A Badly 'Designed' Process Goes Rogue - Cancer - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Dr. Alexandra Nusawardhana, the lead author of the study and who earned her doctorate in biomedical sciences this year from Penn State College of Medicine, conducts research to understand genomic instability and cancer treatment response.

Credit: Jason Plotkin / Penn State. Creative Commons

DNA repair protein gene gone rogue may unlock new cancer treatments | Penn State University

A characteristic of evolved biological systems, and one that distinguishes them from systems designed from first principles, is that they are often unnecessarily complex, vulnerable to failure and dependent on layers of patchwork compensation. This is what we should expect from systems produced by utilitarian, suboptimal compromises built from whatever was available at the time.

With no plan, no foresight and no predetermined objective, natural selection can only favour whatever leaves more descendants in a particular environment. The result is not an ideal solution, but merely a workable one — one that is better than what preceded it, even if it remains a very long way from perfection. An intelligent designer, such as the one proposed by advocates of intelligent design, would be under no such historical constraints and could, in principle, rebuild a system from scratch to arrive at the optimal solution.

To illustrate this, this post and the next will look at two recent papers that incidentally demonstrate how many human health problems arise from these over-complex, error-prone systems — systems that would not exist if the human body were the pinnacle of created perfection that creationists imagine it to be. Unless, of course, the designer intended us to suffer when its systems failed.

The first concerns a paper published in February 2026 in Nature Communications by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. It shows how one component of the DNA repair machinery — a system needed because DNA replication and maintenance are themselves vulnerable to error and damage — can itself go wrong and produce a pattern of genomic instability resembling that seen when the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumour-suppressor pathway is defective.

The culprit is EXO1, a gene that encodes an exonuclease involved in DNA processing and repair. In normal cells, EXO1 helps trim and process damaged or mismatched DNA so that repair can proceed. But when EXO1 is overexpressed, as the researchers found in a significant proportion of several cancers, including about 20–30% of breast and ovarian cancers as well as melanoma, testicular, cervical and hepatobiliary cancers, too much of this normally useful protein becomes destructive. Instead of helping to preserve genome integrity, excessive EXO1 activity can degrade newly synthesised DNA during replication stress, expanding single-stranded DNA gaps and degrading reversed replication forks.

The result is a BRCA-like pattern of genomic instability even in cells whose BRCA pathway is still functional. In other words, the cell behaves in some important respects like a BRCA-mutant tumour cell, not because BRCA1 or BRCA2 is mutated, but because too much EXO1 has overwhelmed the normal protective system. This matters clinically because such tumours may respond to some of the same treatments used against BRCA-mutant cancers, including drugs that target DNA repair vulnerabilities.

So, we have a DNA replication and maintenance system that needs elaborate repair machinery because the genome is constantly vulnerable to damage; then we have the catastrophic consequences when that repair machinery itself goes rogue. Compare that with the simpler, more robust system we might expect from an intelligent designer endowed with foresight and unconstrained by evolutionary history. Complexity is not the hallmark of intelligent design that creationists claim it to be. In biology, it is very often the accumulated consequence of failure-prone, suboptimal compromises produced by evolutionary tinkering without a predetermined objective.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Explain How To Make A Universe - No Magic Required

An expanding mini universe could counterbalance the collapsing matter of a star, thereby creating a stable gravastar.

Credit: Daniel Jampolski and Luciano Rezzolla,
Goethe University Frankfurt

Big Bang inside a star: How a gravastar forms | EurekAlert!

Creationists like to think they have dealt a death-blow to cosmology with the childish question, "How can a universe come from nothing?" Usually, this is not so much an argument as an admission that they have mistaken a failure of their own imagination for a law of physics. They begin with the assumption that "nothing" must mean a sort of empty box waiting for a god to put something in it, then demand that science should explain the box, the waiting, and the god.

But modern physics has a habit of being far more imaginative, and far less parochial, than Bronze Age mythology.

A paper recently published in Physical Review D, by theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Professor Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt, explores one of those ideas that sounds, at first hearing, almost like science fiction: a collapsing star might not inevitably form a conventional black hole. Under the right conditions, the collapse could instead generate what is called a gravastar — a gravitational vacuum star — containing an expanding region of dark-energy-like spacetime, rather like a tiny universe forming inside the dying star.

This does not mean, of course, that physicists have proved that our universe began inside a star, still less that they have solved every problem in cosmology. Nor does it mean that "nothing" in physics is the same as the philosopher's or theologian's absolute nothing. What it does show, however, is that serious scientists can construct mathematical models in which expanding spacetime can arise naturally from the equations of general relativity, without once needing to insert a magic being, a supernatural command, or a cosmic conjuring trick.

That is the part creationists habitually miss. Science is not claiming that universes pop into existence by magic. It is doing what science always does: examining what the known laws imply under extreme conditions, identifying where those laws may need refinement, and testing whether natural processes can account for phenomena that once seemed impossible. In this case, the model suggests that when matter collapses to almost the point of becoming a black hole, a rapidly expanding de Sitter region could form inside it and counterbalance the collapse.

So, far from helping creationism, this work illustrates precisely why the creationist argument from incredulity is so feeble. "I don't understand how it could happen naturally" is not evidence for a god. It is merely the opening sentence of a scientific investigation.

Glossary^ Some Terms Used In This Research. Big Bang: The name given to the early hot, dense, rapidly expanding phase of our universe. It was not an explosion into pre-existing empty space, but the expansion of space itself from an extremely compressed state.

Black hole: An extremely compact object whose gravity is so strong that, within a certain boundary, not even light can escape. Black holes are a natural prediction of Einstein’s general relativity, although their innermost structure remains one of the deepest problems in physics.

Event horizon: The boundary around a black hole beyond which anything that enters cannot return or send information back to the outside universe. It is not a physical surface, but a point of no return in spacetime.

Singularity: In the simplest black-hole models, the point where matter is crushed to infinite density and spacetime curvature becomes infinite. Physicists generally regard this as a sign that the theory has reached its limit, not as a comfortably understood physical object.

Spacetime: The four-dimensional fabric made of three dimensions of space and one of time. In general relativity, gravity is not treated as an invisible force pulling objects together, but as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy.

General relativity: Einstein’s theory of gravity, in which matter and energy tell spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move. It successfully explains many phenomena, including gravitational lensing, black holes, and the expansion of the universe.

Einstein field equations: The mathematical core of general relativity. These equations relate the distribution of matter and energy to the shape and behaviour of spacetime. In this research, the authors explore a new solution to these equations under extreme conditions.

Gravitational collapse: The inward collapse of a massive object under its own gravity. In stars, this can happen when the outward pressure from nuclear fusion can no longer resist gravity.

Nuclear fusion: The process that powers normal stars. Light atomic nuclei fuse into heavier nuclei, releasing energy. That energy helps provide the outward pressure that prevents a star from collapsing while it has fuel available.

Radiation pressure: The outward pressure produced by light and other radiation inside a star. In a stable star, this pressure helps balance the inward pull of gravity.

Ultra-compact star: An object packed into an extremely small volume, with intense gravity. Neutron stars are real examples; gravastars are proposed exotic examples.

Gravastar: Short for “gravitational vacuum star”. It is a proposed alternative to a black hole: an extremely compact object that could look much like a black hole from the outside, but without an event horizon or singularity. In the model discussed here, it contains a dark-energy-like interior.

Horizonless black-hole mimicker: A hypothetical object that would resemble a black hole in many observational ways, but would not have an event horizon. A gravastar is one such proposed object.

Dark energy: The name given to whatever is causing the expansion of our universe to accelerate. In simple terms, it behaves like a form of energy associated with empty space and can produce a repulsive, outward effect on cosmic scales.

Vacuum energy: Energy associated with space itself rather than with ordinary matter. In cosmology, vacuum-like energy can act rather like dark energy, driving expansion instead of collapse.

De Sitter spacetime: A mathematical model of spacetime dominated by vacuum energy or dark-energy-like behaviour. In the gravastar model, a tiny de Sitter region forms inside the collapsing matter and expands outward.

Nucleation: The beginning of a new region or phase from an initially tiny seed. Here it refers to the formation of a de Sitter region at the centre of the collapsing star.

Schwarzschild radius: The radius within which a given mass would become a black hole if compressed sufficiently. For a non-rotating black hole, this radius marks the event horizon.

Oppenheimer-Snyder collapse: A classic simplified model of a collapsing star, first studied in 1939. It treats the collapsing matter as a uniform sphere of pressureless “dust”, making the mathematics easier to handle.

Dust sphere: In this context, “dust” does not mean household dust. It means idealised matter with density but no pressure. Physicists use such simplified models to explore the consequences of gravity in a manageable way.

Compactness: A measure of how much mass is packed into a given radius. The more compact an object is, the stronger its gravitational field becomes. In this model, there is a limit beyond which collapse to a black hole becomes unavoidable.

Equilibrium: A balanced state. In the proposed gravastar model, the inward pull of the collapsing matter is balanced by the outward expansion of the dark-energy-like interior.

Computational simulation/model: A mathematical or computer-based exploration of what the equations predict under specified conditions. It is not the same as a direct observation, but it can show whether a proposed physical process is mathematically possible.

Fine-tuned conditions: Conditions that must fall within a narrow range for a particular outcome to occur. This does not mean supernatural “fine-tuning”; it means the model works only under specific physical assumptions.

New physics: A phrase physicists use when known theories may need extending or replacing under extreme conditions. It does not mean magic; it means there may be natural processes that current theories do not yet fully describe.

“Nothing” in physics: Not necessarily the absolute philosophical “nothing” beloved of creationist apologetics. In physics, even apparently empty space can have structure, fields, energy, and laws. Confusing these meanings is one of the common tricks in creationist arguments about the origin of the universe.

The Paper in Physical Review D was accompanied by a news release from Goethe University via EurekAlert!:

Refuting Creationism - How Modern Humans Benefitted from Meeting Denisovans

AI-generated Image (Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking)

Image provided by Tucci Lab

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution | Yale News

A paper recently published by a Yale University-led team in the journal Science shows how Denisovan genes in the people of Near Oceania have contributed especially to their immune systems, and so have continued to influence human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

Who would be a creationist? It must be galling to wait so eagerly for that great day when biologists finally announce the collapse of evolutionary theory and admit that a better explanation of the observable evidence is one involving unevidenced magic entities doing conjuring tricks with chemistry and physics. That would make biology the first science to abandon natural explanations, ignore Occam’s Razor, and adopt magic as a basic principle. Sadly for creationists, that long-promised day shows no sign of arriving, despite having been predicted any day now for more than half a century.

But then, what would creationism be without a dogged refusal to change its mind when the evidence demands it, and the childish belief that the evidence itself must be part of some vast conspiracy to test the strength of faith? That is not science; it is apologetics dressed up in a lab coat.

The problem, as always, is that reality refuses to conform. The universe continues to produce evidence contradicting creationism and confirming the complex evolution of humans over deep time: migration, isolation, adaptation, bottlenecks, and repeated remixing with genes from other archaic human lineages, themselves the products of long evolutionary histories.

The real-world evidence written into our genomes is that most non-African human populations carry remnants of Neanderthal DNA, while Denisovan ancestry is especially marked in Near Oceanians and in some Asian populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans themselves met and interbred in central Asia. Human evolution was not a simple ladder, still less a single act of special creation, but a branching, merging, reticulated history of populations moving, separating, adapting and sometimes meeting again.

Some of these archaic genes appear to have mattered because they were useful. In particular, they are often associated with immune responses to pathogenic bacteria and viruses. This makes evolutionary sense: Denisovan-like populations had already adapted to environments outside Africa, including their local burden of pathogens. When the ancestors of present-day Near Oceanians inherited some of that genetic variation through introgression, beneficial variants could be retained by natural selection, even while many other archaic variants were gradually lost.

The Yale-led team filled an important gap in our understanding of human evolution by sequencing the genomes of 177 individuals from 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analysing them alongside 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.

They found evidence that the ancestors of Near Oceanian populations interbred with at least three distinct Denisovan-like groups. They also identified thousands of archaic variants that affect how genes are switched on or off, with a notable concentration in immune and antiviral pathways. In other words, Denisovan DNA is not merely a fossil remnant in the genome; in some populations, it is still helping to shape biology today.

Refuting Creationism - A Vast Global Fungal Plant-Support System - Unintelligently 'Designed' Over 480 Million Years [Updated]

Mycorrhizal fungi under the microscope at AMOLF biophysics institute in Amsterdam. The circular structures are spores. Color is altered for legibility.

Credit: Tomás Munita

New global research maps underground fungal infrastructure for the first time - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

An international team of researchers, led by ecologist Justin Stewart of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has announced the creation of the first global map of the vast underground infrastructure formed by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The team has published its findings in Science.

These are not fungi in the familiar sense of mushrooms, but microscopic, thread-like filaments, or hyphae, which form intimate partnerships with plant roots. The figures involved are astonishing. The researchers estimate that the upper layer of the world’s soils contains about 110 quadrillion kilometres of these fungal filaments — enough to stretch from Earth to the sun nearly three-quarters of a billion times, or there and back about 368 million times. The networks also transport roughly 4 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent into soils each year, about 11% of annual human-caused CO₂ emissions.

This is not a new evolutionary phenomenon. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are part of an ancient plant-fungal symbiosis that appears to date back roughly 475–480 million years, close to the origin of the first land plants. That does not mean, of course, that the individual fungal filaments mapped today are hundreds of millions of years old, but that this type of mutualistic relationship has been evolving since the early colonisation of land by plants.

One sure way to tell that biological systems are not intelligently designed is not simply that they are complex, but that they are historically contingent. They carry the marks of accumulated compromises, improvised workarounds and layered dependencies. Evolution can only modify what already exists; it cannot scrap an imperfect arrangement and begin again with a clean sheet. Its only test is whether a change works well enough, in a particular environment, to leave more descendants than the alternatives.

None of these constraints would apply to an intelligent designer, still less to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect designer imagined — though rarely named explicitly — by creationists trying to disguise fundamentalist creationism as science. A designed global life-support system would not be expected to emerge through countless local bargains between plants and fungi, mediated by nutrient stress, carbon demand, soil chemistry, competition, disturbance and natural selection.

So we can be as sure as it is possible to be that this vast, intricate and globally important biological infrastructure was not intelligently designed. It evolved because both partners gained from the exchange: plants provided carbon fixed by photosynthesis; fungi extended the reach of plant roots, supplying water and mineral nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen. Over deep time, those local mutual advantages became part of the living fabric of terrestrial ecosystems.

The paper in Science is accompanied by a news release from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which includes a link to an interactive map of this global fungal infrastructure.

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Hagfish By LOSS of Eye Complexity

Feeding hagfish

Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Refuting Creationism - Bizarre Creature From The Long History of Earth Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus

Art by Jorge Gonzalez
© NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus, a new species of Shuvosauridae from Late Triassic rocks of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

Art by Jorge Gonzalez, © NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

New Species of Bizarre, Bipedal, Toothless Crocodile Relative from the Triassic Discovered | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

Evolution, proceeding without a plan and lacking any sense of direction, can produce some truly bizarre creatures which, despite their appearance, survived perfectly well in the environments in which they evolved. Indeed, it would be bizarre to suppose otherwise, given that natural selection favours those forms that work well enough to survive and reproduce over those less well fitted to do so. To suppose otherwise would rival creationism for irrationality.

In this post, I’ll deal with a bizarre distant relative of the crocodiles; in the next, I’ll write about a strange theropod dinosaur from 70 million years ago that comes close to what any creationist might imagine a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds should look like.

Creationism is, of course, itself the product of an evolutionary process, forced into ever more bizarre forms by the hostile environment of scientific evidence. Modern creationism has therefore, by a similar process, become almost as bizarre as the life forms it is forced to deny in order to survive.

The sad thing is that creationists are denied the wonder of the truth about our planet as revealed in increasingly astonishing detail by science, because the facts must be waved aside and denied in order to cling to the childishly simplistic belief in magic and a world full of evil conspirators diligently working to trick them into changing their minds.

Who, for example, could have predicted that a distant relative of the crocodiles walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and had a toothless mouth tipped with a beak? It is almost as bizarre as the mental gymnastics creationists need to perform to dismiss it and force-fit the evidence into the predetermined conclusion that it must have been magically created within the last few thousand years and then allowed to go extinct for no apparent purpose — or that the evidence must either have been forged, misinterpreted or planted to test or deceive us.

Nevertheless, this creature, Labrujasuchus expectatus, did exist about 212 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, and its description is the subject of a recent paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Its fossilised remains were unearthed in Late Triassic rocks at the Hayden Quarry, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA, by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Alan H. Turner of Stony Brook University, New York, USA, with colleagues including Dr Nathan D. Smith of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California, USA.

To add insult to injury for creationists, this find fills one of those beloved gaps into which creationists try to force fit their creator god. The gap was that between two earlier discovered shuvosaurs from the region. It's discovery was thus a predicted by the Theory of Evolution, not by a book of Bronze Age mythology.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Gigantism in British Island Wrens

A St Kilda Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes hirtensis

Photo: Craig Nisbet

A Shetland Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus, Kergord, Mainland, Shetland

Photo credit: Dr Michał Jezierski

New research helps scientists unlock evolution of gigantism in Scottish island wrens - University of Birmingham

Creationists will continually demand evidence for evolution being observed, then, when the evidence is provided, immediately insist that science should adopt their childish parody of evolution, in which one species turns into an unrelated species in a single miraculous event. That is not evolution as any biologist understands it. In fact, if such a thing were ever observed, it would falsify the Theory of Evolution, not confirm it.

By demanding evidence for something no scientist has ever claimed happens, creationists imagine they are somehow refuting science, or at least providing a plausible anti-Darwin argument for people who do not understand the science.

So this example of evolution in living populations will almost inevitably be dismissed by creationists using that same disingenuous tactic. It is evidence for the evolution of island gigantism in isolated populations of the wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, on Scottish islands. And, to rub salt in creationists' wounds, it is not merely a single isolated example, but multiple examples of gigantism evolving in island environments — an example of parallel evolution in response to similar environmental pressures acting on different local populations.

In other words, this is not some local curiosity that can be waved away as a one-off oddity, but the predictable result of isolation, restricted gene flow and similar island conditions acting on related populations. The evidence has just been published, open access, in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society by researchers led by the University of Birmingham.

The researchers, led by Dr Michał Jezierski, examined four subspecies of island wren, each isolated on a specific Scottish island or archipelago — Shetland, Fair Isle, the Outer Hebrides and St Kilda. Each of these subspecies is geographically isolated, yet exposed to broadly similar island environments, and each differs significantly from the wrens found throughout mainland Britain and continental Europe.

The study showed that the wrens of St Kilda and Shetland show little evidence of interbreeding with the mainland population. These two populations have evolved spectacular island gigantism: a wren from England will typically weigh about 7–10 grams, while a St Kilda wren weighs about 13–16 grams. The largest St Kilda wrens are therefore more than twice the weight of the smallest mainland wrens, and their genetic distinctiveness is so marked that the researchers say they may be on the way to becoming separate species.

Importantly, the genomic evidence shows that the Shetland and St Kilda wrens are genetically distinct from each other, despite having evolved similar enlarged body sizes. In other words, the same broad evolutionary outcome has arisen independently in separate island populations, rather than being inherited from a single already-giant ancestor. That is exactly what evolutionary biology predicts: related populations, isolated in similar environments, can be shaped in similar directions by similar selection pressures, even when the detailed genetic route differs.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Blood Cells Have Evolved From Our Single-Celled Ancestor from 700 Million Years Ago

The origin of blood cells can be traced back approximately 700 million years to when human ancestors were single-celled organisms. When these ancestors evolved into multicellular organisms (animals), macrophages emerged as the first blood cells. Over the course of subsequent evolution, various blood cells, such as mast cells, diversified.

KyotoU / Yosuke Nagahata

The 700-million-year history of our blood cells | EurekAlert!

In a stunning, albeit unwitting, rebuttal of creationist claims, a team of researchers at Kyoto University is due to publish, on 29 May 2026, the results of their investigation into the evolutionary history of animal blood cells in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The paper, entitled "Animals have expanded the evolutionary legacy of unicellular ancestors in blood cells", is unlikely to please those creationists who keep assuring their dupes that biomedical scientists are about to abandon 'Darwinism' and adopt creationism instead.

It will also disappoint those who insist there is no evidence for the evolution of complex multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors — what they like to caricature as the 'microbes-to-man hypothesis', as though humans, preferably modern Americans, were the preordained end-point of the entire history of life. That, of course, is creationist teleology masquerading as biology: the assumption that evolution must have been aiming at us because Bronze Age religion says humans are the central purpose of creation.

What the Kyoto University team found was not a sudden, magical appearance of blood cells, but a deep evolutionary continuity. They developed a new method for comparing gene-expression profiles across different animal cell lineages and species, and included unicellular organisms in the comparison in order to trace the possible origin of blood cells back to our single-celled animal ancestors.

Among human blood-cell lineages, macrophages showed the closest resemblance to unicellular organisms. This is hardly surprising, since macrophages still behave in a remarkably cell-autonomous way: they move through tissues, detect targets, engulf bacteria, clear dead cells and remove unwanted material — behaviour strongly reminiscent of free-living phagocytic cells.

The team then traced the gene FOS, commonly expressed in blood cells across animal species, back to a single-celled ancestor that lived about 700 million years ago, around the time when the first animals were evolving. The implication is that the earliest animal blood cells did not appear from nowhere. They arose when early multicellular animals repurposed genetic programmes inherited from their unicellular predecessors.

From there, the researchers were able to reconstruct a family tree of blood-cell lineages spanning roughly 700 million years. Their analysis suggests that early blood cells were macrophage-like, that mast cells later branched from that macrophage lineage, and that prototypic T cells and red blood cells subsequently branched from mast cells. Prototypic B cells, meanwhile, appear to have branched from the macrophage lineage after mast cells had already diverged.

In other words, the blood and immune cells circulating in our bodies today are not isolated, specially-created structures with no history. They are modified descendants of ancient cellular systems, inherited, repurposed and diversified during the evolution of animals from unicellular ancestors.

So, far from supporting the creationist claim that there is no evidence for the evolution of complex life from single-celled ancestors, the evidence is literally circulating in our blood. It is also circulating in the blood and immune systems of other animals, carrying with it a molecular and cellular legacy hundreds of millions of years older than the creation myths of the Bronze Age.

And, as usual, the Theory of Evolution provides the only coherent explanation for the observable facts. The research does not point to separate acts of creation, nor to a sudden magical appearance of blood cells fully formed and without ancestry. It shows descent with modification, inherited genetic programmes, divergence of cell lineages, and the repurposing of ancient biological mechanisms — exactly the pattern evolutionary theory predicts, and exactly the pattern creationism cannot explain without special pleading.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - This Evidence Wouldn't Exist If The Genesis Myths Were Real History

An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleolithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. This kind of wood was used for the Marathousa 1 digging stick. Use-wear analysis of stone tools at Marathousa 1 shows evidence of woodworking.

Credit: Original art by G. Prieto, copyright K. Harvati.

Earliest evidence of wooden tools used by humans - University of Reading

This is another of those pieces of evidence that should not exist if the Bible narrative were true — yet it does. The only honest conclusion is that the Bible narrative is false. It simply never happened. In scientific terms, this is falsification.

The evidence was published on 26 January 2026 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). It consists of two worked wooden objects discovered at Marathousa 1, in Greece’s central Peloponnese, by an international team led by researchers from the University of Reading, the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. The tools have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, making them the earliest known hand-held wooden tools and pushing back direct evidence for this kind of technology by at least 40,000 years.

That is awkward evidence for creationists, because the Bible is commonly interpreted by them as saying that humans were created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global flood that supposedly covered even the highest mountains. Such an event should either have obliterated fragile evidence of wooden tool use or buried it beneath a thick, worldwide layer of flood sediment containing the remains of the animals and plants destroyed in that catastrophe. And, of course, loose wooden tools submerged in a global flood would hardly be expected to remain neatly preserved in the archaeological context in which they were used.

Yet these wooden tools exist. They were recovered from secure Middle Pleistocene deposits, not from some chaotic jumble of flood debris. They are associated with stone tools, worked bone and butchered animal remains, including elephant, showing that Marathousa 1 was a lakeshore site used by early humans for a range of activities, including butchery and woodworking. In other words, the evidence is not floating around without context; it forms part of a coherent archaeological scene about 420,000 years older than the creationist date for the magical creation of Earth and everything on it.

One of the objects is a small alder trunk fragment with clear traces of shaping and use-wear, consistent with a multifunctional digging stick probably used at the edge of the ancient lake. The other is a much smaller worked piece of willow or poplar, possibly representing a previously unknown type of small Pleistocene wooden tool. A third piece of alder, initially investigated as a possible artefact, appears instead to have been marked by a large carnivore, possibly a bear — another indication that humans and carnivores were exploiting the same lakeshore environment.

The Marathousa 1 site lay in the Megalopolis Basin, a region that appears to have acted as a glacial refugium during a critical period in human evolution, when more complex behaviours and more diverse technologies were developing. The finds show early humans using not just stone, but wood and bone too — exactly what we should expect from intelligent, adaptable hominins making use of the materials around them, and exactly what is so rarely preserved because wood normally decays long before it can fossilise or survive archaeologically.

Refuting Creationism - The Fossil Record Confirms Evolution - And Falsifies Creationism

Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.

Alex Boersma

Fossil Trove Expands Range of Squishy Early Animals - American Museum of Natural History

A paper published on 20 May 2026 in Science Advances by a team of palaeontologists led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, very neatly illustrates the difference between evolutionary biology and creationism. It reports the discovery of a rich new Ediacaran fossil site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories, containing fossils that appear earlier in the record, and in deeper-water settings, than current models of the Ediacaran biota had led palaeontologists to expect.

That is not a problem for evolution; it is how science progresses. Unexpected evidence does not destroy a scientific theory merely because it requires a refinement of detail. In this case, the discovery extends the known geographical, ecological and chronological range of part of the Ediacaran biota — the strange, mostly soft-bodied organisms that preceded, and helped set the stage for, the later Cambrian diversification of animal life.

When asked what would falsify the theory of evolution, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied, “a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian”. He was making the simple point that evolutionary theory predicts a broad historical sequence: mammals should not appear before vertebrates, vertebrates should not appear before animals, and rabbits should not appear hundreds of millions of years before their ancestors. A genuine rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be an anachronism so extreme that it would call the whole historical framework into question.

But that is not what palaeontologists have found here. The newly reported fossils are not out of sequence; they are exactly the kind of organisms that belong in late Precambrian rocks. The surprise is not that they are in the wrong part of life’s history, but that some of them appear a little earlier, in a wider geographical range, and in somewhat different environments than previously recognised. In other words, the anomaly is chronological and ecological, not evolutionary.

To a creationist, of course, the question of falsification has to be avoided, because the honest answer is deeply uncomfortable. The fossil record as a whole does not show a sudden magical creation of all living things a few thousand years ago. It shows succession: organisms appearing, diversifying, changing and disappearing through vast spans of geological time. The dating of the rocks, using multiple independent geological and radiometric methods, consistently points to an ancient Earth and a long history of life, not to a recent creation week followed by a global flood.

That is why every such discovery is awkward for creationism but routine for science. Fossils are not distributed randomly, as they would be if all life had been created at once and then jumbled together in a recent catastrophe. They occur in a recognisable sequence, constrained by stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, developmental biology and, for later organisms, genetics. The details are continually revised, but the broad pattern remains overwhelmingly consistent with evolution and wholly inconsistent with Biblical literalism.

By any honest application of the scientific method, that should be enough to falsify the creationist narrative beyond reasonable doubt. That it does not do so for creationists is not because the evidence is weak, but because the conclusion is protected from evidence. When the conclusion is sacred, facts become things to be explained away, misrepresented or ignored.

For evolutionary biologists, however, an unexpected fossil is not an embarrassment to be dismissed, but a clue to be investigated. If the evidence shows that part of the White Sea assemblage was present in Laurentia earlier than previously recognised, and in deeper-water environments, then the scientific response is to refine the model. The theory is not weakened by that process; it is strengthened, because it can absorb new evidence, generate better questions and produce a more accurate account of what happened.

The fossils described in this paper include more than 100 specimens, with several groups not previously recorded from North America, including Dickinsonia, Funisia, Kimberella and Eoandromeda. Some are estimated to be about 567 million years old, overlapping with the older Avalon assemblage and extending the known range of the White Sea assemblage by around 5–10 million years. The researchers also found that these organisms lived in deeper-water settings than had previously been recognised for this assemblage, supporting the idea that some early animal innovations may have begun offshore before spreading into shallower environments.

Refuting Creationism - What Was Before The Big Bang? It Wasn't Nothing!

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Forget sci-fi wormholes — physicists now think Einstein’s mysterious “bridge” may connect two directions of time itself.

Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe

A paper published open access in January 2026 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity should, if creationists could understand it, shoot one of their favourite foxes: the supposed killer question, "What came before the Big Bang?"

Only a creationist could believe the absurd notion that once literally nothing existed as a state of being, and that a god — presumably also made of nothing, because there was nothing to make it from — simultaneously existed and created everything out of that nothing by casting a magic spell, spoken in a language there was no-one else to communicate with in. The first intuitive mistake in that convoluted nonsense is the assumption that the default state of existence is non-existence.

Creationists, however, hypocritically try to hold science to a much higher standard than they apply to their own nonsensical superstitions. While demanding answers to what they imagine are "Gotcha!" questions of science, they routinely dismiss any answer with a wave of the hand. One favourite "Gotcha!" is: what was there before the Big Bang? The usual response is that, in the simplest version of standard cosmology, the question may be meaningless, because time and space themselves are part of the universe being described. If time does not extend through t = 0, then there is no "before" in the ordinary sense. But to a teleologically minded creationist, the answer that there was no "before" at the Big Bang sounds like a cop-out — a way of avoiding the question.

But what if there was a "before", not in the naive sense of empty time waiting around for a universe to be inserted into it, but in the deeper sense that what we call the Big Bang may have been a transition between two time-related phases of a larger physical system?

That this is at least a theoretical possibility comes from the work of three theoretical physicists, Enrique Gaztañaga and K. Sravan Kumar of the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, UK, and João Marto of the Departamento de Física, Centro de Matemática e Aplicações (CMA-UBI), Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal. They have revisited the work of Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, whose 1935 paper led to the idea of Einstein–Rosen bridges. These were later popularly interpreted as "wormholes" connecting different regions of spacetime, although that was not the original purpose of the idea.

Using a quantum-field-theoretic approach, Gaztañaga, Kumar and Marto argue that Einstein–Rosen bridges may not be space-travel tunnels at all, but mathematical bridges connecting two complementary components of a quantum state — two microscopic arrows of time. In one component, time flows in the direction we experience; in the other, it is mirrored in the opposite direction. Near black holes, or in expanding and collapsing universes, both components may be needed for a complete quantum description.

This offers a possible route through the black hole information paradox: the puzzle of how information can be preserved when matter crosses an event horizon and a black hole eventually evaporates. In the authors’ interpretation, information is not destroyed; it continues to evolve through the time-reversed, mirror component of the quantum state. That would preserve the quantum requirement that information is not simply lost, without requiring science-fiction wormholes, time machines or supernatural intervention.

The idea also opens the possibility that what we call the Big Bang was not an absolute beginning, but a bounce — a quantum transition from a preceding phase of cosmic evolution. In that scenario, our universe could even be the interior of a black hole formed in an earlier, parent cosmos, where collapse on one side becomes expansion on the other. The Big Bang, in other words, would not be a magical creation event, but a natural physical gateway.

That possibility also recalls an earlier speculative but serious scientific idea proposed by Lee Smolin in 1992, known as cosmological natural selection. Smolin suggested that black holes might give rise to new universes, with the physical constants of each descendant universe varying slightly from those of its parent. Universes whose laws favour the formation of many black holes would therefore tend to leave more descendant universes, rather as organisms that leave more offspring become over-represented in a biological population.

This is not evolution by genes, of course, and it is not established fact. It is a speculative cosmological hypothesis. But it is scientific speculation of the proper kind: naturalistic, mathematically framed, open to criticism and, in principle, vulnerable to observational evidence. It stands in stark contrast to creationism, which answers the same question with nothing more substantial than magic, asserted certainty and Bronze Age mythology.

One of the authors of the paper, Enrique Gaztanaga, also wrote an article in The Conversation, explaining their idea for a lay readership. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Australian Crocodiles Are Fatal To Creationism

Saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus poros

By Molly Ebersold
St Augustine's Alligator Farm,
Public Domain, Link

Jorgo Ristevski, CC BY

129,000 years of crocodiles: what we know about Australasia’s ancient apex predators

According to Bronze Age Biblical mythology, existing species should have no ancestors because they were all supposedly magicked into existence fully formed during a few days of creation, just a few thousand years ago.

That childish belief has to be clung to by creationists despite the evidence of the real world, which tells a very different story: not of sudden manufacture, but of deep evolutionary history, extinction, replacement and survival. The iconic saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia provide a good example. They are not isolated products of a one-off act of creation, but living survivors of a much richer Australasian crocodylian history stretching back tens of millions of years, during which crocodile relatives occupied a variety of ecological niches, including those of formidable predators.

Modern Australia has only two native crocodile species: the freshwater crocodile, Crocodylus johnstoni, and the Indo-Pacific or saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus. But the fossil and archaeological evidence shows that these are merely the remnant survivors of a once more diverse crocodylian fauna, including the now-extinct mekosuchines, a distinctive Australasian group whose members included species very unlike the crocodiles familiar today.

Now a group of researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University, together with colleagues from several other institutions, has pieced together the fragmentary evidence from 26 fossil and archaeological sites across Australasia to build a clearer picture of the crocodylians that once lived in the region, and of their interactions with humans. Their review of the evidence was recently published, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The study shows that the late Pleistocene record of Australian crocodylians is still incomplete and often difficult to date securely, but it nevertheless reveals a lost diversity. The extinct mekosuchines appear to have declined and disappeared on mainland Australia around the same broad period as other Australian megafauna, while some survived much later on south-west Pacific islands such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji. There, their remains occur in archaeological contexts, suggesting that they persisted until after human arrival and may have been affected by human activity.

Three of the authors have also written an article in The Conversation, explaining their research and its significance for understanding the evolutionary history of these reptiles. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Europe's Most Complete Stegosauria Skull - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Illustration of Dacentrurus armatus.

Adrián Blázquez / Fundación Dinópolis.

Europe’s most complete stegosaurian skull unearthed in Teruel, Spain | Pensoft.blog

Another day, another dinosaur. At least, that must be how it feels to creationists trying to cling to demonstrably false beliefs by ignoring the evidence and pretending each new discovery is either a mistake, a fraud, or a sinister attempt by scientists to undermine their faith.

This time the problem comes from Teruel, Spain, where palaeontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis have described an exceptionally well-preserved partial skull of a stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Villar del Arzobispo Formation, dating to about 150 million years ago. Their results, published in May 2025 in the Pensoft journal Vertebrate Zoology, identify the fossil as belonging to Dacentrurus armatus, and as the most complete stegosaurian skull yet found in Europe.

That matters because stegosaurian skulls are notoriously rare. Their bones were fragile, and the animals’ skulls were small compared with their heavily built bodies, so cranial material is much less commonly preserved than vertebrae, limb bones, plates or tail spikes. A skull as complete as this one is therefore not just another fossil for a museum drawer, but a valuable piece of anatomical evidence for understanding how these plated, quadrupedal herbivores evolved.

Using this specimen, the researchers were able to refine the known anatomy of Dacentrurus armatus and reassess the evolutionary relationships of stegosaurs more generally. Their analysis supports the division of Stegosauria into two major clades, Huayangosauridae and Stegosauridae, and they formalise a further grouping, Neostegosauria, to include later-diverging stegosaurids. In other words, one skull from Spain helps clarify not only a single European dinosaur species, but the wider evolutionary history and geographical spread of the iconic plated dinosaurs.

If nothing else, work such as this illustrates how science treats a new discovery: not as a threat to be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with dogma, but as additional evidence to be tested against existing knowledge. Where necessary, classifications are revised, hypotheses are adjusted, and understanding moves a little closer to reality.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and then tries to make the evidence fit. Science starts with the evidence and changes the conclusion when the evidence demands it. That is why a 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull from Spain is a contribution to human knowledge, not a theological inconvenience to be waved away.

Refuting Creationism - Collagen In a 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Fossil - Time To Crank Up The Creationist Lie Machine

Discovery of collagen in fossil bone could unlock new insights into dinosaurs - News - University of Liverpool

An open-access paper published in January 2025 in the journal Analytical Chemistry will no doubt have had creationist disinformation merchants rubbing their hands with glee, because it is exactly the sort of finding they can misrepresent to their scientifically illiterate followers as 'proof' that dinosaurs lived only a few thousand years ago, provided they first wrap it in the usual recycled falsehoods about geological dating methods.

The paper, by a team led by Professor Stephen Taylor of the University of Liverpool, with colleagues from the university’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, the Materials Innovation Factory, and the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports strong evidence for preserved collagen remnants in a 66-million-year-old dinosaur fossil. The fossil in question is a 22 kg sacrum from Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed hadrosaur, excavated from Upper Cretaceous strata of the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota.

Of course, what creationists will not be telling their followers is that this was not a case of fresh dinosaur meat, intact soft tissue, or anything remotely resembling a recently dead animal. The researchers used several independent analytical techniques. Cross-polarised light microscopy showed a pattern of birefringence consistent with collagen; tandem liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry identified and quantified hydroxyproline, an amino acid strongly associated with collagen in bone; and bottom-up proteomics detected collagen peptide sequences. In other words, the finding is evidence of degraded collagen remnants preserved within an exceptionally well-preserved fossil, not evidence that the fossil is young.

To a creationist disinformation merchant, the question will be: how can we exploit the intuitive but mistaken assumption that all proteins must decay within a few years, so that the presence of collagen remnants can be sold as 'proof' that this dinosaur died recently? To a scientist, the question is very different: since the fossil comes from rocks known from independent geological evidence to be around 66 million years old, what happened during fossilisation to allow traces of original organic molecules to persist for so long?

That contrast could hardly be clearer. Creationism begins with its conclusion and then tries to force every inconvenient fact into it. Science begins with the evidence and asks what the evidence implies. Creationists ask how the facts can be made to protect a predetermined dogma; scientists ask what has to be revised, refined, or investigated further in the light of new evidence.

The real scientific importance of this discovery is not that it challenges the age of the fossil, but that it opens up new possibilities for studying ancient life. If remnants of collagen can survive under particular fossilisation conditions, then other exceptionally preserved fossils may also retain molecular traces that can help clarify relationships between extinct animals, reveal more about dinosaur biology, and improve our understanding of how organic molecules can persist over geological time.

Creationism seeks to close down enquiry by pretending that all the answers were written down by Bronze Age storytellers. Science does the opposite: it asks better questions, develops better techniques, and adds to the sum total of human knowledge.