Malevolent Design - How Cancer Perfectly Illustrates ID Creationism's 'Proof' of Intelligent Design

Creationism's God at work

Creationism's intelligent designer creating cancer.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2).

Dresden research group uncovers new key mechanism in cancer cells | TU Dresden

ID advocates should be thrilled to learn that a team of researchers from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany, together with colleagues from Charles University, Prague, Czechia, have discovered a perfect example of what Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe claim is proof of intelligent design—namely complex specified information and irreducible complexity. The team have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

There is one slight problem, however: this supposed ‘proof of intelligent design’ turns out to be one of the mechanisms that makes cancer so effective at increasing pain and suffering — and at killing people.

This presents creationists with a theological conundrum. Either there is more than one intelligent designer, which comes close to—or even crosses—the line into blasphemy, or the intelligent designer is actively and knowingly creating a cause of pain and suffering, and is therefore not the omnibenevolent deity portrayed in the Bible.

The stark alternative to these theologically insurmountable problems is equally problematic for ID creationism: admitting that their ‘proof of intelligent design’ is nothing of the sort, and is better explained as the result of a natural process in which no intelligence was involved—thereby absolving their god of any culpability.

The TUD-led team discovered that the protein MCL1 not only inhibits programmed cell death, or apoptosis, but also plays a central role in tumour metabolism. Normal, non-cancerous cells will usually self-destruct if their DNA becomes corrupted beyond repair, but when this process fails, a tumour can develop through the proliferation of cells carrying damaged DNA. In cancers, this self-destruct mechanism is suppressed by MCL1.

The team also found that MCL1 is not only responsible for preventing apoptosis, but also dysregulates cellular energy metabolism. In other words, a single factor ensures both cancer cell survival and the functioning of key metabolic and signalling pathways for the benefit of the tumour.

In Michael J. Behe’s terms, all the components of this survival mechanism must be present for the cancer to persist; and in William A. Dembski’s terms, the genetic information coding for MCL1 must constitute highly specified complex information.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Transitional Species' That is Probably Another Ancestral Hominin

Dr Jesse Martin of LaTrobe University thinks Little Foot could be a whole new branch of the human family tree.

Photograph: La Trobe University

Iconic fossil may be new type of human ancestor, News, La Trobe University

A brief communication, published last November in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology may, if creationists never read past the title (as usual), have produced a frisson of excitement in those circles. It questioned the taxonomic status of one of the most complete fossil skeletons of an early ancestral hominin, Australopithecus prometheus, popularly known as “Little Foot”.

However, reading even a little further would have turned that excitement into disappointment — assuming, of course, that they understood what they were reading. The authors were not questioning whether the fossil was ancestral at all, but whether it had been assigned to the correct position in the hominin family tree, or whether it should instead be recognised as a distinct ancestral hominin species. In other words, this was a discussion about how many transitional species there are, not whether transitional species exist at all.

The only crumb of comfort available to creationists is the familiar claim that this demonstrates how science “keeps changing its mind”, something they take as evidence that science is fundamentally unreliable—presumably including even those parts they routinely misrepresent as supporting their beliefs.

For anyone who understands the scientific method, and the importance of treating all knowledge as provisional and contingent on the best available evidence, this paper represents the principle functioning exactly as it should. Far from being a weakness, this willingness to revise conclusions in the light of new information is what makes science self-correcting and progressively more accurate over time.

The authors of the paper — a team led by La Trobe University adjunct Dr Jesse Martin—carried out a new analysis of the “Little Foot” fossils and concluded that the specimen was probably placed in the wrong taxon when first described on the basis that it does not share the same “unique suite of primitive and derived features” as Australopithecus africanus. Since that initial assessment, additional fossils of A. prometheus have been discovered, and it has become clear that “Little Foot” also differs from those specimens. At the same time, it remains sufficiently distinct from A. africanus that reassignment to that species is not justified. In short, it possesses its own unique combination of primitive and derived traits and should therefore be recognised as a separate species.

Naturally, there is no real comfort here for creationists. The phrase “suite of primitive and derived features” is simply palaeontological shorthand for evidence of descent with modification—what Darwin referred to as transitional forms. It follows that the researchers involved have no doubt whatsoever that the species under discussion evolved from earlier ancestors, and there is no hint that they believe it was spontaneously created, without ancestry, by magic.

Refuting Creationism - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Source: Canadian Geographic.

Researchers find evidence of cosmic impact at classic Clovis archaeological sites | The Current

A new paper in PLOS One presents compelling evidence that a comet exploding in Earth’s atmosphere around 13,000 years ago played a major role in the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons across Eurasia and North America, and in extinguishing the Clovis Culture, the archaeological sites of which provided the evidence for the impact. The study was led by James Kennett, Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, working with an international team of collaborators.

The findings cut directly across a familiar creationist trope: the claim that Earth is “finely tuned” to be a benign and stable haven, perfectly suited for human life. This notion, often promoted by parochial American creationists, quietly assumes that the wider world is a trivial backdrop where nothing of consequence ever happens. It ignores the obvious realities of earthquakes, floods, famines, volcanic eruptions and climate shocks—realities that dominate both human history and the deep geological record.

That record tells a very different story. Earth’s past is marked by repeated catastrophes, ranging from abrupt climate shifts to mass extinctions, many triggered by astronomical or geological events. Impacts from space, massive volcanism, plate tectonics and cascading ecosystem failures have repeatedly reshaped life on this planet. Far from being a delicately balanced paradise, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile environment in which survival has always depended on adaptation—and, frequently, sheer luck.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's Evidence of Bipedalism in a Hominin From 7 Million Years Ago

Cast of the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis
a species discovered in the early 2000s.

By Didier Descouens - Own work
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human.

Anthropologists Offer New Evidence of Bipedalism in Long-Debated Fossil Discovery

We are only three days into 2026 and already creationism is facing an avalanche of new evidence against it and in favour of evolution on an ancient Earth in a vastly older Universe — directly contradicting the Bronze Age origin myths that creationists cling to with the desperation of a drunk clutching a lamppost.

The latest blow comes from the New York University Department of Anthropology, where a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Scott Williams, working with colleagues from the University of Washington, Chaffey College, and the University of Chicago, have carried out a detailed re-examination of fossil remains attributed to Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Their analysis provides strong evidence that this species was bipedal and shared several key skeletal characteristics with later bipedal hominins, including the australopithecines and members of the genus Homo.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis was discovered in the early 2000s, and its place in human evolution has been debated ever since. Some researchers argued it might represent an extinct ape rather than a stem hominin. Evidence for habitual bipedalism, however, strongly favours the latter interpretation, making S. tchadensis the earliest known human ancestor currently identified in the fossil record.

As such, it becomes yet another example of the transitional species that creationists continue to insist do not exist, often under the mistaken belief that Charles Darwin — whom they treat as the final authority on all matters evolutionary — admitted that the absence of transitional forms was a serious problem for his theory. In reality, Darwin explicitly predicted that such fossils would eventually be found, and the subsequent century and a half of palaeontology has repeatedly confirmed that prediction.

The discovery is of a point of attachment on the femur of a ligament only found in bipedal hominins. The importance of bipedalism in human evolution cannot be overstated. Habitual upright walking is one of the defining characteristics that separates hominins from other apes, reflecting a fundamental shift in anatomy, locomotion, and behaviour. It requires extensive reorganisation of the skeleton, including changes to the position of the foramen magnum, the curvature of the spine, the shape of the pelvis, the proportions of the limbs, and the structure of the feet. Because these adaptations are complex, interdependent, and leave clear signatures in fossilised bones, bipedalism is not a trivial or ambiguous trait. Evidence for it in Sahelanthropus tchadensis therefore places this species firmly on the human lineage and pushes the origin of upright walking — and with it the human evolutionary trajectory — back far earlier than creationist models allow.

Scott Williams’ team have now published their findings, open access, in Science Advances.

Creationism Refuted - Reconstructing Ancient Ecosystems From Molecules Trapped in Fossils

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

Credit: Timothy Bromage and Bin Hu,
NYU Dentistry

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Show What Earth Was Like When Life Got started - 3.5 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

One reliable way to recognise that the Bible is the product of ancient ignorance is simply to compare its claims with what science has since revealed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Genesis, which turns out to be a ludicrously simplistic attempt to explain the origins of the universe and life on Earth. Its compressed timescale cannot possibly accommodate what we now know about the age of the universe, the age of our planet, the deep history of life, or—most conspicuously—the emergence of human cultures and the migration of humans across every continent except Antarctica, as revealed by the archaeological record.

The gap between biblical mythology and reality is so vast that it cannot plausibly be rescued as allegory or metaphor, and the evidence continues to accumulate relentlessly, with nothing being discovered that remotely validates the biblical account. The year 2025 ended badly for creationism with the discovery of a 37-million-year-old transitional snake fossil from southern England, and 2026 has begun no better. A new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, by Simon Lamb, Associate Professor of Geophysics at Victoria University of Wellington, describes the surface conditions on Earth when life first emerged more than 3.5 billion years ago—conditions utterly incompatible with the biblical creation narrative. The research behind this book is summarised in an article in The Conversation, also by Associate Professor Lamb. That article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

Simon Lamb, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

You have probably seen the images of the surface of Mars, beamed back by NASA’s rovers. What if there were a time machine capable of roaming Earth during its remote geological past, perhaps even going right back to its beginnings, beaming back pictures of similar quality?

This is not science fiction. In remote corners of the world, geologists have found tiny relics of Earth’s very ancient surface.

I have been part of this scientific endeavour, looking at the treasure trove of information in the bedrock of the Makhonjwa Mountains in South Africa and the adjacent small kingdom of Eswatini.

These rocks reach back more than three quarters of the way through our planet’s long history of nearly 4.6 billion years. In my new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, I describe the graphic images “beamed back” by this geological time machine.

Beneath the remote and rugged landscape of the Makhonjwa Mountains, in Eswatini, is a bedrock that holds a record of Earth’s surface from 3.2 to 3.5 billion years ago, when our planet was about a quarter of the way through its history.

Copyright: © Tony Ferrar Source

World of oceans

The ancient rocks reveal a world with extensive oceans and intense volcanic activity on the sea floor.

Deep beneath the crust, Earth was much hotter than today, giving rise to an unusual white-hot magma, rich in elements from its interior. Huge volumes of super-heated water continually gushed out of underwater cracks, building up chimneys of valuable metals. And life was thriving around these undersea vents.

Volcanic islands rose up from the ocean depths. These were dangerous places. Pools of hot bubbling mud dotted their shores, and clouds of volcanic ash periodically exploded from volcanic craters.

Life was already there, forming microbial mats in the sheltered nearshore waters.

Periodically, large earthquakes violently shook the bedrock, triggering submarine avalanches that cascaded down into the deep ocean, creating vast jumbles of rock on the sea floor. Giant asteroid impacts disturbed this world, but crucially, did not extinguish it.

Deep-seated forces were pushing up new land, creating the early continents.

Ocean waves moved back and forth on sandy beaches along coastlines with bays, lagoons, inlets and estuaries, with tides similar to those today.

During floods, large rivers brought muddy water from the continental interior. Farther in the distance, their headwaters drained a mountainous terrain, often enveloped in thick cloud.

It was a blue planet because, like today, the oceans scattered light in the blue part of the colour spectrum.

But the atmosphere contained a lethal cocktail of gases, including high concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide. These greenhouse gases kept the surface at the right temperature for liquid water, at a time when astrophysicists calculate the Sun was much weaker. But there was no oxygen.

The earliest life forms were anaerobic microbes, although brightly coloured – pink or purple have been proposed.

Oceania today

Oceania, in the southwestern Pacific, may illustrate best what this early world was like. Here, the ocean is peppered with volcanic islands and small continents, rocked by great earthquakes where tectonic plates rub against each other. There are even clues to how life began.

The 2022 eruption of the Hunga volcano, near Tonga, created a mushroom cloud of ash that burst out of the ocean and reached up into space with an estimated energy of a 60-megaton atomic bomb. It generated more than 200,000 lightning strikes and left behind a deep underwater crater filled with a chemical soup derived from numerous underwater hot vents.

Experiments show that lightning strikes can trigger the synthesis of basic organic molecules needed by living organisms. Millions of Hunga-like eruptions on early Earth would have created myriad opportunities to kick start the chemistry of life in underwater volcanic craters – life was born out of extreme geological violence.

Staying blue

Going back in time beyond the Makhonjwa Mountains, we still find evidence for oceans, life and, I argue, plate tectonics. Earth became blue within the first tenth of its history.

Mars and Venus may have started this way, too. But our planet uniquely lies in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, receiving just the right amount of solar energy to avoid becoming a boiling Venusian hell or freezing Martian world.

It is also big enough to have a magnetic field and pull of gravity sufficient to retain its atmosphere. And right at the start, a dramatic collision with a Mars-sized asteroid spalled off our Moon, stabilising Earth’s spin axis so that day and night were less extreme.

Finally, the biochemistry of living organisms may have played a key role in keeping Earth this way by helping the bedrock absorb greenhouse gases in the face of a steadily warming Sun.

We must not be the first to let Earth lose its distinctive life-giving blue, a colour so wonderfully referred to in the Siswati language of Eswatini as luhlata lwesibhakabhaka, literally “green like the sky”.

Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

What emerges from this work is not a minor disagreement over interpretation, nor a gap that can be papered over with metaphor or selective reading. The world described by geology, geochemistry and planetary science is fundamentally incompatible with the universe imagined by the authors of Genesis. Earth was not a gentle, pre-prepared garden awaiting life, but a violent, unstable planet shaped by impacts, volcanism and relentless geological recycling over billions of years. Life did not appear suddenly by decree, but clawed its way into existence under conditions that would have been lethal to almost anything alive today.

This matters because creationism depends on the claim that its sacred text offers a privileged insight into reality. Yet when examined against the physical evidence locked into Earth’s oldest rocks, Genesis is not merely wrong in detail—it is wrong in kind. Its authors had no conception of deep time, planetary formation, plate tectonics, or the chemical and physical constraints under which life emerged. Their account reflects the worldview of Bronze Age pastoral societies, not hidden wisdom awaiting modern confirmation.

As discoveries like these continue to accumulate, the creationist position becomes ever more untenable. There is no convergence, no narrowing of the gap, no sense in which science is “catching up” with scripture. Instead, each new insight into Earth’s early history widens the chasm between myth and reality. The Bible does not describe the world we inhabit, the planet on which life evolved, or the processes that made our existence possible—and no amount of reinterpretation can change that.

Creationism Refuted - A Terrible End to a Bad Year for Creationism - a 37-Million-Year-Old Transitional Fossil Snake

The new fossil snake species, Paradoxophidion richardoweni, lived in a much warmer England over 37 million years ago.

© Jaime Chirinos

The most commonly found bones of fossil snakes are their vertebrae, which contain traits that scientists can use to identify the species.

© Georgalis and Jones

“Weird” new species of ancient fossil snake discovered in southern England | Natural History Museum

2026 is shaping up to be yet another dreadful year for the creationist cult, as palaeontology, archaeology, geochronology, and genetics continue to uncover facts that do not merely show creationism to be a divinely inspired allegory or metaphor, but demonstrate that it is simply and unequivocally wrong at every level.

At times it seems like an unfair contest between myths invented by Bronze Age pastoralists—without the slightest benefit of scientific understanding—and the cumulative output of modern science. It is rather like a chess match between a pigeon and a powerful computer, in which the pigeon’s concept of chess is to knock the pieces over, then strut about on the board declaring victory. This tactic is known in creationist circles as “debate”, and everywhere else as “pigeon chess”.

As usual, the closing months of the year have brought yet more palaeontological evidence that creationism cannot accommodate. This latest find dates to around 37 million years before creationists believe Earth was magicked into existence, bears the unmistakable fingerprints of one of those supposedly “non-existent” transitional forms, and displays the familiar mosaic of archaic and modern features that are commonplace in the fossil record. It also fits precisely into the established timeline of reptilian evolution and was discovered in southern England, in deposits that align exactly with the known geological and climatological history of the region.

The fossil was discovered in 1981 at Hordle Cliff, England, and donated to the Natural History Museum in London, where it has now been identified as a new species. The identification was made by Professor Georgios L. Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, currently a visiting researcher at the Natural History Museum. His paper, co-authored with Dr Marc E. H. Jones, curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians, has recently been published open access in Comptes Rendus Palevol.

Hordle Cliff, Geology. Hordle Cliff is one of the most important and intensively studied fossil-bearing coastal exposures in southern England. Its significance lies in the exceptional sequence of Eocene marine sediments exposed by continual coastal erosion along the western Solent.

---

Geological setting

Hordle Cliff lies on the coast of Hampshire, west of Milford-on-Sea, forming part of the Hampshire Basin, a large sedimentary basin that accumulated marine and marginal-marine deposits during the early Cenozoic. The strata exposed here date mainly to the Late Eocene, approximately 41–34 million years ago, a time when southern England lay beneath a warm, shallow sea.

---

Stratigraphy

The cliff exposes a classic succession of Eocene formations, including:

• Barton Group (upper Eocene)
  • Dominated by clays, silts, and fine sands
  • Deposited in shallow marine conditions
  • Exceptionally fossil-rich
• Barton Clay Formation
  • The most famous unit at Hordle Cliff
  • Known for abundant molluscs, sharks’ teeth, rays, fish remains, turtles, crocodilians, birds, and reptiles (including snakes)
  • Indicates warm, subtropical seas with nearby coastal and estuarine environments

These sediments accumulated gradually, layer upon layer, in calm marine settings—exactly the opposite of the chaotic, high-energy deposition required by flood-geology models.

---

Depositional environment

During the Late Eocene, this region experienced:

• **Warm greenhouse climates
• High sea levels
• Low-energy marine sedimentation

Fine-grained clays settled slowly out of suspension, allowing delicate fossils to be preserved intact. Many beds show bioturbation, shell beds, and orderly fossil assemblages—clear evidence of stable ecosystems persisting over long periods.

---

Fossil significance

Hordle Cliff is internationally important because it preserves:

• Highly diverse faunas spanning multiple ecological niches
• Mosaic evolutionary forms, including transitional reptiles
• Fossils preserved in situ, not reworked or mixed from different ages

This makes the site particularly valuable for reconstructing Eocene ecosystems and tracing evolutionary change through time.

---

Structural and erosional features

The cliffs themselves are relatively soft and unstable:

• Frequent slumping and landslips continually expose fresh material
• Ongoing erosion has made Hordle Cliff productive for over two centuries
• The geology is simple and undisturbed, with gently dipping strata—no folding, overturning, or tectonic chaos

---

Why this matters for creationist claims

The geology of Hordle Cliff presents multiple, independent problems for young-Earth creationism:

• The sediments record millions of years of gradual deposition
• Fossils are ordered, local, and ecological, not globally mixed
• Climatic signals match global Eocene warming trends
• The strata fit seamlessly into the wider regional and global geological record

There is no evidence whatsoever of rapid, catastrophic deposition, let alone a single global flood. Instead, Hordle Cliff is a textbook example of slow geological processes operating exactly as modern geology predicts.

The discovery and its broader significance were explained in a recent Natural History Museum news item by James Ashworth.

“Weird” new species of ancient fossil snake discovered in southern England

---

An extinct snake has slithered its way out of obscurity over four decades after its discovery.

The newly described species of reptile, Paradoxophidion richardoweni, is offering new clues in the search for the origin of ‘advanced’ snakes.

---

In 1981, the backbones of an ancient snake were uncovered at Hordle Cliff on England’s south coast. They’ve now been revealed as the remnants of a previously unknown species.

Research published in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol has identified that the vertebrae belong to a new species named Paradoxophidion richardoweni. This animal would have lived around 37 million years ago, when England was home to a much wider range of snakes than it is now.

While little is known about this animal’s life, it could shed light on the early evolution of biggest group of modern snakes. This is because Paradoxophidion represents an early-branching member of the caenophidians, the group containing the vast majority of living snakes.

The new species is so early in the evolution of the caenophidians that it has a peculiar mix of characteristics now found in different snakes throughout this group. This mosaic of features is summed up in its genus name, with Paradoxophidion meaning ‘paradox snake’ in Greek.

Its species name, meanwhile, honours Sir Richard Owen. Not only did he name the first fossil snakes found at Hordle Cliff, but this scientist was also instrumental in establishing what’s now the Natural History Museum where the fossils are cared for, giving the name multiple layers of meaning.

Lead author Dr Georgios Georgalis, from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, says that being able to describe a new species from our collections was ‘a dream come true’.

It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there, so, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling. It’s especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there’s not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened.

Dr Georgios Georgalis, lead author
Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals
Polish Academy of Sciences
Krakow, Poland.

The most commonly found bones of fossil snakes are their vertebrae, which contain traits that scientists can use to identify the species.

© Georgalis and Jones.

What’s been discovered at Hordle Cliff?

Hordle Cliff, near Christchurch on England’s south coast, provides a window into a period of Earth’s history known as the Eocene that lasted from around 56 to 34 million years ago.

Dr Marc Jones, our curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians who co-authored the research, says that this epoch saw dramatic climatic changes around the world.

Around 37 million years ago, England was much warmer than it is now, though the Sun was very slightly dimmer, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were much higher. England was also slightly closer to the equator, meaning that it received more heat from the Sun year round.

Dr Marc E.H. Jones, co-author
Curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians.
Natural History Museum
London, UK.

Fossils were first uncovered at Hordle Cliff around 200 years ago. In the early 1800s Barbara Rawdon-Hastings, the fossil-hunting Marchioness of Hastings, collected the skulls of crocodile relatives from the site, one of which Richard Owen would later name after her.

Since then, a variety of fossil turtles, lizards and mammals have also been uncovered at Hordle Cliff. There are also abundant snake fossils, including some particularly important species.

The fossil snakes found at Hordle Cliff were some of the first to be recognised when Richard Owen studied them in the mid-nineteenth century. They include Paleryx, the first named constrictor snake in the fossil record. Smaller snakes from this site, however, haven’t been as well investigated. Paradoxophidion’s vertebrae are just a few millimetres long, so historically they’ve not had a lot of attention.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

To get a better look at these fossils, Marc and Georgios took CT scans of the bones. In total, they identified 31 vertebrae from different parts of the spine of Paradoxophidion.

We used these CT scans to make three dimensional models of the fossils. These provide a digital record of the specimen which we’ve shared online so that they can be studied by anyone, not just people who can come to the museum and use our microscopes.

Dr Marc E.H. Jones.

The scans show that the fossils are all slightly different shapes and sizes, as the snake’s spine bones gradually taper from head to tail. However, they share some features that show they all belong to one species.

Georgios estimates that Paradoxophidion would have been less than a metre long, but other details about this animal’s life are hard to say. The lack of a skull makes it difficult to know what it ate, while the vertebrae don’t have any sign of being adapted for a specialised lifestyle, such as burrowing.

The backbones of Paradoxophidion are surprisingly similar to those of Acrochordus snakes.

© Smacdonald via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

A living link to the past?

Though the vertebrae don’t give much away about Paradoxophidion’s lifestyle, they are strikingly similar to a group of snakes known as the Acrochordids. These reptiles are known as elephant trunk snakes due to their unusually baggy skin.

Today, only a few species of these snakes can be found living in southeast Asia and northern Australia. But they’re among the earliest branches of the caenophidian family tree, with a fossil record extending back over 20 million years.

As Paradoxophidion is really similar to the acrochordids, it’s possible that this snake could be the oldest known member of this family. If it was, then it could mean that it was an aquatic species, as all Acrochordids are aquatic. On the other hand, it might belong to a completely different group of caenophidians. There’s just not enough evidence at the moment to prove how this snake might have lived, or which family it belongs to.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

Finding out more about Paradoxophidion and the early evolution of the caenophidians means that more fossils will need to be studied. Georgios hopes to continue his work in our fossil reptile collections in the near future, where he believes more new species might be waiting.

I’m planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen. These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century. There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven’t been investigated before that I’m interested in looking at. These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

Publication:

Georgalis G.L. & Jines M.E.H. (2025).
A new peculiar early diverging caenophidian snake (Serpentes) from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England, in Georgalis G.L., Zaher H. & Laurin M. (eds), Snakes from the Cenozoic of Europe – towards a macroevolutionary and palaeobiogeographic synthesis.
Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (25): 505-530. https://doi.org/10.5852/cr-palevol2025v24a25

A novel caenophidian serpent (Serpentes) peculiar to early divergence from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England

We describe here a new genus and species of snake, based on several trunk and caudal vertebrae, from the late Eocene (MP 17a) of Hordle Cliff, England. We studied the fossil material using both visual microscopy and computed tomography (μCT), focusing on its intracolumnar variation and comparing it extensively with other Paleogene snake taxa from England and continental Europe. The new small taxon is characterized by a set of bizarre and distinctive vertebral features that may differentiate it from all other snakes. Its morphology is somewhat similar to that of russellophiids; however, some of its anatomical features are radically different from those seen in the latter group and thus defy such placement at the family level. Furthermore, the new English taxon bears a striking resemblance to extant acrochordids, particularly the species Acrochordus granulatus (Schneider, 1799). Consequently, we consider the new taxon to most likely represent an early divergent caenophid, possibly even a member of the Acrochordidae Bonaparte, 1831, well outside the stratigraphic and geographic distribution known to date for the latter group. It further adds to the astonishing diversity of vertebral morphologies in European Paleogene snakes.

Appendix 1. — Flythrough video of the μCT of the holotype trunk vertebra NHMUK PV R 10795.

---

Appendix 2. — Flythrough video of the μCT of the caudal vertebra NHMUK PV R 10796.

Georgalis G.L. & Jines M.E.H. (2025).
A new peculiar early diverging caenophidian snake (Serpentes) from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England, in Georgalis G.L., Zaher H. & Laurin M. (eds) Snakes from the Cenozoic of Europe – towards a macroevolutionary and palaeobiogeographic synthesis.
Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (25): 505-530. https://doi.org/10.5852/cr-palevol2025v24a25

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by [publisher]. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Taken together, the geology of Hordle Cliff leaves no room for creationist evasions. The sediments accumulated slowly in warm, shallow Eocene seas, preserving stable marine ecosystems over millions of years. The fossils are local, ordered, and ecologically coherent, embedded within undisturbed strata that fit seamlessly into the wider geological history of southern England and the global Eocene record. None of this resembles the chaotic aftermath of a recent global catastrophe; all of it is exactly what conventional geology predicts.

The newly identified fossil from this site simply adds to the embarrassment. It is neither out of place nor out of time, but sits precisely where evolutionary theory says it should—both stratigraphically and anatomically—displaying the familiar mosaic of ancestral and derived features that creationists insist do not exist. Hordle Cliff has been yielding such transitional forms for over two centuries, and every one of them tells the same story.

For creationism, this presents a recurring and insoluble problem. Each new discovery must be dismissed, distorted, or ignored, not because it is anomalous, but because it fits too well. Hordle Cliff is not an exception to the rule; it is the rule itself—one more quietly devastating reminder that the natural world records its own history with remarkable consistency, and that history bears no resemblance whatsoever to a Bronze Age flood myth.

---

Advertisement

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.

Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.

Advertisement

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

As Anticipated In My Novels - Wolves Lived With Humans 3,000-5,000 Years Ago

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö where 3,000-5,000 year-old wolf remains were found.

Photo: Jan Storå

Illustration from "The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic"

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

This article struck a chord with me — not primarily because it refutes creationism, although it certainly does that by presenting evidence that simply should not exist if the biblical flood genocide story contained even a kernel of truth. Such evidence ought either to have been swept away entirely or buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing a chaotic jumble of animal and plant fossils from unrelated landmasses. It was neither.

What resonated more personally, however, is that I have just published a novel in which a clan of Neolithic hunter-gatherers forms a close association with wolves, with the animals playing a central role in both their hunting strategies and their folklore. In the novel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic — the second volume in the Ice Age Tales series — Almora is raised alongside a wolf cub that becomes her inseparable guide and protector. This relationship gives rise to several versions of a mythologised hunt in which the wolf, Sharma, saves the day and defends the hunters. Together with her Neanderthal partner, Tanu, Almora later leads a group of exiles who encounter a clan already familiar with these legends, and who have begun adopting abandoned wolf cubs and raising them as part of the community.

It is fiction, of course — but a deliberately realistic depiction of how wolves could have been domesticated through mutual benefit, cooperation, and prolonged social contact with humans.

The article itself concerns the discovery by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of East Anglia of wolf remains on a remote Baltic island that could only have been transported there by boat. Isotopic analysis shows that these wolves consumed the same food as the humans, and skeletal pathology in one individual indicates long-term care. The findings are reported in a research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Cancer - Or Was It Malevolent Design?

Graphical abstract

Scientists find cancer weak spot in backup DNA repair system | Scripps Research

Scientists at the Scripps Institute have discovered a defective DNA repair mechanism that would normally trigger cell death but which, paradoxically, keeps cancer cells alive. They have recently published their findings, open access, in Cell Reports. It is exactly the sort of biochemical complexity that creationists routinely mistake for evidence of intelligent design, having been led to believe that well-designed systems must be highly complex. In reality, good intelligent design is minimally complex: complexity increases the risk of failure, is harder to maintain, and is more energetically costly.

The DNA “code” is one of creationism’s favourite props for its familiar ignorance-plus-incredulity-therefore-God-did-it argument — a textbook god-of-the-gaps false dichotomy. Yet even a superficial look beneath the metaphor reveals that DNA replication and repair are very far from the flawless perfection we would expect from an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity — especially when it comes to its supposedly special creation, humankind. What we actually observe is a fragile, error-prone system patched together by evolutionary history rather than foresight.

The system is only needed in the first place because cell replication in multicellular organisms remains essentially identical to that of single-celled organisms. Despite the fact that the benefits of multicellularity arise from cell specialisation into tissues and organs with discrete functions — each requiring only a tiny fraction of the genome — every cell is forced to copy the entire DNA complement every time it divides. This vast waste of energy and resources serves only to multiply the probability of error, and errors are not rare anomalies but routine occurrences. This is not the signature of intelligent design.

The Scripps Institute team have shown that some cancer cells survive precisely because the normal high-fidelity repair system fails. When that happens, a crude backup mechanism takes over — an emergency repair process that is little more than a biological kludge and which introduces further errors as it works. It is rather like calling out an emergency plumber who fixes one leak by installing a long section of pipe riddled with smaller leaks. Would anyone describe that as intelligent workmanship?

Creationism Refuted - A Rich Collection of Dinosaur Fossils from 72 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

The ancient environment and its fauna.

Reconstruction by Tibor Pecsics

Paleontoligists have discovered an exceptionally rich dinosaur site in Transylvania.

Normally, creationists seize on any concentration of animal fossils that can be attributed to flooding as supposed “evidence” for their favourite Bronze Age myth of a global genocide. On that basis, they should be delighted by recent news from Romania describing a rich deposit of dinosaur fossils that appears to have accumulated as a result of flooding in the Hațeg Basin.

There is, however, a serious snag. These fossils occur in deposits dated to around 72 million years ago — tens of millions of years before creationists believe the Earth even existed — and the evidence points clearly to repeated local flooding events, not a single global catastrophe.

The discovery of the fossil site is reported in the journal PLOS ONE by the Valiora Dinosaur Research Group, a collaboration of Hungarian and Romanian palaeontologists co-led by Gábor Botfalvai and Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Department of Palaeontology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.