Creationism Refuted - The Neanderthal Genes We Inherited Are Still Making A Difference.

We carry the legacy of our ancestors interbreeding with Neanderthals

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Shana - the daughter of a Neanderthal father and a Homo sapiens mother
Cover illustration for my book The Way of the Wolf

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Neandertal growth hormone receptor increases muscle mass in people today | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Evolutionary history is often represented as a neatly branching tree: an ancestral population divides, its descendants diverge, and each resulting lineage continues along its own independent path. Real evolution, however, is frequently much less tidy.

As I explained in my previous post on the Hawaiian honeycreepers, lineages that have begun to diverge can subsequently meet again and exchange genes through hybridisation. The result is reticulated evolution: an evolutionary history that is partly tree-like but also contains connecting branches where genes have passed between related populations.

The same principle applies to our own ancestry.

Modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were not separately created, genetically sealed “kinds”. They were closely related human lineages produced by population separation and divergence, but that separation was never absolute. When populations encountered one another again, they sometimes interbred, allowing genes from one evolutionary branch to enter another—a process known as introgression.

Much of the resulting Neanderthal-derived DNA carried by people today may have little or no detectable effect. Some introgressed variants, however, continue to influence human biology. An international team led by Philipp Kanis of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Hugo Zeberg of Karolinska Institutet has now investigated one particularly interesting example: the Neanderthal version of the growth-hormone receptor.

Their peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology examines two amino-acid substitutions in the receptor that were characteristic of Neanderthals. The growth-hormone receptor sits on the surface of cells and transmits the signal produced when growth hormone binds to it, helping to regulate the growth of bone, muscle and other tissues.

In laboratory-grown cells, the Neanderthal form of the receptor produced a stronger response to growth hormone than the common modern-human version. Under the experimental conditions used, cells carrying it grew by about 40 per cent more, with most of the increase attributable to one of the two Neanderthal-derived substitutions.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary Radiation Of Hawaiian Honeycreepers

Hawaiian honeycreepers

Source: Wikipedia (various contributors)

Loxiodes bailleui

By Jack Jeffrey, USGS - gallery.usgs.gov, Public Domain, Link

Smithsonian Scientists Resolve the Hawaiian Honeycreeper Family Tree | Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

Only a few days after writing about Darwin’s famous Galápagos finches and how the Galápagos daisy had parallelled their evolutionary radiation, another group of island birds provides an even more spectacular example of adaptive radiation.

This time the setting is the Hawaiian archipelago, and the birds are the Hawaiian honeycreepers — an extraordinary collection of finches that evolved an assortment of beaks, diets and ways of life from a shared ancestral population.

More than 60 species of Hawaiian honeycreeper are known, ranging from thick-billed seed-eaters and nectar-feeders to birds with long, curved beaks for probing flowers or extracting insects from beneath bark. Some became so anatomically different that, before their evolutionary relationships were understood, naturalists found it difficult to believe that they could all be related.

But related they are. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael G. Campana and colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and National Museum of Natural History, the honeycreepers form a single adaptive radiation whose history includes not only repeated branching into new species but also genetic exchange between some of those emerging lineages.

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

Impression of a Tyrannosaurus rex attacking an Edmontosaurus annectens

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Tooth traces on ulna HRS10076.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist’s impression of Urokodia.

Credit: Xiaodong Wang

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism in Crisis - Speciation in Progress? - Genetic Isolation In A British Dolphin.

Risso's dolphin Grampus griseus.

Credit: Nicola Hodgins

Risso's dolphin, Grampus griseus

© Nicola Hodgins.

British Risso’s dolphins belong to single population - University of Exeter News

According to newly published research in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (JMBA), Risso’s dolphins, Grampus griseus, around the British Isles appear to form a single, genetically connected population. At the same time, their mitochondrial DNA distinguishes them from dolphins sampled elsewhere in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, suggesting that the British population has experienced relatively little genetic exchange with more distant populations.

The research was conducted by an international team whose joint first authors were Nicola K. Hodgins, a visiting researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, and Ing Chen of National Taiwan Normal University, with Michael Krützen of the University of Zurich as corresponding author.

At first sight, describing the British dolphins as both a single population and genetically distinct might seem contradictory, but the two findings concern different geographical scales. Within British waters, the dolphins appear to interbreed freely enough to prevent significant regional genetic divisions from developing. Compared with populations farther afield, however, reduced gene flow has allowed the British population to acquire a distinctive genetic signature.

Malevolent Design - More Evidence That Malaria Was 'Designed' By Creationism's Putative Designer God? - Or Just Evolution Again?

A daughter parasite forms through budding from the mother cell.

As budding of the daughter parasite progresses and membrane protrusion increases (yellow), the molecular safety rope (blue) lengthens.

The images were created based on electron microscopy data and processed using AI.

© UKHD

Figure EV1: Blood-stage immunofluorescence expression profile of PfSFA2 and ultrastructure expansion microscopy (U-ExM) of PfSFA1 localization.

(A) IFA of PfSFA2-smV5 expression across the asexual blood stages, stained with an anti-V5 antibody (green), an anti-PfGAP45 antibody (magenta), and Hoechst (DNA, blue). “Ring” stage with one nucleus, trophozoite stage (“Troph”) with 2, and several stages throughout schizogony, including segmentation, are shown with the number of nuclei. The minimum and maximum displayed values for the PfSFA2-V5 and PfGAP45 channels follow the “Reset” values of the first segmentation image. Scale bars: 2 µm. (B) U-ExM of PfSFA1-smV5 schizonts stained with an anti-V5 antibody (cyan), an anti-CrCen antibody (outer-CP, magenta), SYTOX (DNA, blue), and an NHS ester-conjugated dye (grayscale). Sub-z-slices of a 7-nuclei (top) and a 14-nuclei (bottom) schizont are maximally projected and shown to the left. Representative centriolar plaque regions are numbered and shown as insets to the right. Z-depth of each maximum projection is shown to the right. Scale bars: 5 µm for full schizont; 1 µm for inset.

He, B., Ali, I., Dorner, L.P. et al. (2026).

News - Research in Germany

Creationists insist that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved. If several interacting components are required for a system to function, they label it “irreducibly complex”; if genes encode proteins that perform a particular function, they call the DNA “complex specified information”. Both are then presented as evidence that the system must have been deliberately designed by an intelligent agent.

Curiously, however, this supposedly reliable design-detection method tends to be applied only to systems that creationists find impressive or beneficial. When comparable complexity enables a parasite to invade its host, evade its defences, reproduce rapidly and cause suffering and death, the inference to design is quietly abandoned. The parasite is instead blamed on “the Fall”, “genetic degeneration” or some other evidence-free theological excuse.

But a method that gives different answers according to whether its conclusion is theologically convenient is not a method at all. If molecular complexity, functional interdependence and genetically encoded organisation really demonstrate intelligent design, then they must do so just as reliably in a malaria parasite as in a bacterial flagellum, an eye or a blood-clotting system. And that would make them evidence not merely of intelligent design, but of intelligent malevolent design.

Two recent studies have now uncovered more of the extraordinarily elaborate machinery by which malaria parasites multiply. Instead of dividing into two daughter cells in the familiar way, Plasmodium parasites repeatedly copy their DNA and multiply their nuclei within a shared cell before producing numerous daughter parasites more or less simultaneously. The process must ensure that each viable daughter receives a nucleus and the cellular structures required to invade another host cell.

Creationism In Crisis - After Darwin's Finches It's Darwin's Daisies - Evolution In Progress

Serrated leaves of Scalesia affinis (radiate-headed scalesia)

Photo: Michael Martin, NTNU University Museum

Botany’s answer to Darwin’s finches shows evolution in real time

The Galápagos Islands occupy an iconic place in the history of evolutionary biology. The animals and plants Darwin encountered there during the voyage of HMS Beagle contributed important evidence to the theory he developed after returning to England: that living species are not fixed and immutable but are the products of a long historical process.

Darwin eventually realised that natural selection acting upon inherited variation could produce organisms that appeared designed for their environments, without foresight, planning or divine intervention. Individuals possessing variations that gave them an advantage in their particular circumstances tended to leave more descendants, causing those variations to become more common over successive generations.

Like the uniformitarian geologists—particularly Charles Lyell—Darwin recognised that the world as we see it is not a fixed unchangeable result of a single act of perfect creation, but is the product of natural processes operating over immense periods of time. The processes that shaped the past are still operating today and will continue to shape the future.

The familiar story that Darwin saw the Galápagos finches and immediately conceived his theory is, however, an oversimplification. During the voyage, he believed he had collected birds belonging to several different groups, including finches, grosbeaks, blackbirds, wrens and warblers. Only after the ornithologist John Gould examined the specimens in England did it become apparent that these apparently disparate birds belonged to a distinctive group of closely related species—what we now call Darwin’s finches, although taxonomically they are members of the tanager family.

Darwin then appreciated the evolutionary significance of their shared characteristics and striking differences. Their varied body sizes and beaks could be understood as modifications of a common ancestral form, associated with different diets and ecological niches throughout the archipelago. One ancestral population had diversified into numerous related forms: a process now known as adaptive radiation.

The standard creationist response is to dismiss Darwin’s finches as evidence for evolution because they remain recognisably finch-like. This objection depends upon the childish parody of evolution in which one species should turn suddenly into an entirely different and supposedly unrelated species. Such an event would not demonstrate evolution; it would contradict the branching process of descent with modification. Descendants necessarily remain related to their ancestors and inherit modified versions of ancestral structures.

This misconception lies behind such familiar creationist “Gotchas!” as “Why do we never see evolution happening?” and “Why has evolution stopped?” Evolution has not stopped. What creationists demand to see is not evolution but an instantaneous transformation that evolutionary biology neither predicts nor requires.

Darwin knew nothing of Mendelian genetics or DNA, of course. Modern genomic research has confirmed the common ancestry of his finches while revealing a history more complicated than a simple, neatly branching tree. Rapidly diverging lineages can retain genetic variants inherited from their common ancestor and can occasionally exchange genes through hybridisation.

Now, genomic research into a family of plants—the genus Scalesia, commonly known as the Galápagos giant daisies—has provided a botanical counterpart to Darwin’s finches. In only about one million years, the founding lineage has diversified into 15 recognised species occupying habitats ranging from dense, humid highland forests to hot, dry and exposed lowlands. They vary from low-growing shrubs to trees, with leaves ranging from large and unlobed to small, deeply lobed and intricately serrated.

Refuting Creationism - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans - No Just A Single Couple - Not Even A Single Species

Interwoven Human ancestry

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New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors - Berkeley News

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes.

Meaghan Marohn

The evolutionary ancestry of modern Homo sapiens is far more complex than anything the authors of the Bible’s absurdly simplistic origin myths could have imagined. We already know that populations of our species migrating out of Africa interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and that these two archaic lineages also exchanged genes with one another. Consequently, most people with ancestry outside Africa carry some Neanderthal DNA, while many Asian and especially Oceanian populations also carry Denisovan DNA.

Now, according to a paper just published in Science, our ancestry is even more complicated. A team led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and 54Gene, has identified genetic material inherited from two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages. These are described as “ghost” lineages because no sequenced genome from either population is available: their existence must be inferred from the traces they left in the genomes of living people.

The researchers developed a computational method called TRACE — TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation — which reconstructs genealogical relationships among segments of DNA. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, TRACE can detect contributions from extinct populations without requiring DNA recovered from their bones.

Refuting Creationism - No 'Waters Of The Deep'!

Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) with nanometer resolution of the selected inclusion.

Camarda, C., Gervasoni, F., Jalowitzki, T. et al (2026).

Schematic cross-section showing a cold subducted slab descending through the mantle transition zone into the deep mantle. The cold, very cold slab and hot geotherms are represented by dashed lines.

Camarda, C., Gervasoni, F., Jalowitzki, T. et al (2026).

Analysis of a super-deep diamond reveals how water travels to the Earth’s interior

Creationists have long been fond of two superficially impressive but scientifically worthless arguments. The first is that tiny amounts of carbon-14 detected when diamonds are placed in an accelerator mass spectrometer somehow show that diamonds—and therefore Earth—are only a few thousand years old. The second is that the discovery of “water” deep inside Earth confirms the biblical “fountains of the great deep” and, when convenient, explains where all the water from Noah’s supposed global flood subsequently disappeared.

A paper recently published in Scientific Reports brings these two favourite misconceptions together in a combination that may prove irresistible to professional misrepresenters of science. It therefore seems prudent to explain what the researchers actually found before the inevitable claims begin circulating.

Carolina Camarda and colleagues examined an irregular diamond, just 3 millimetres long, recovered from the Juína region of Brazil. Super-deep diamonds form at depths greater than about 300 kilometres, rather than at the approximately 150-kilometre depths typical of most diamonds, and can preserve microscopic inclusions of minerals that record conditions far below the surface.

Using synchrotron X-ray tomography, diffraction and spectroscopy, the team mapped more than 100 inclusions inside the diamond. One completely sealed inclusion, only about 35 micrometres across, contained a complex mixture of goethite—an iron oxyhydroxide with the formula FeOOH—together with hematite and magnetite. Another inclusion contained ferropericlase, a mineral characteristic of the deep mantle, supporting the conclusion that the diamond originated far below the crust.

The researchers propose that the goethite originally formed within hydrated oceanic crust or lithosphere. As that crust was carried downwards at a subduction zone, the goethite changed into a high-pressure form capable of surviving within a relatively cold descending slab. At still greater pressures and temperatures it began to decompose into iron oxides, releasing H₂O and oxygen into the surrounding mantle. The diamond then encapsulated part of this mineral assemblage, preserving evidence of the process.

In other words, the discovery concerns the slow transport of surface-derived water downwards through plate subduction. It is not evidence of a primordial subterranean ocean bursting upwards to flood Earth. Nor does it show where the water from an imaginary global flood went afterwards. The “water” carried by goethite is chemically incorporated into its crystal structure, principally as hydroxyl groups; it is not a liquid ocean occupying enormous caverns beneath the crust. It can be liberated as molecular water only when the mineral undergoes chemical reactions under extreme mantle conditions.

The study examined one microscopic inclusion and made no estimate of a hidden ocean, no calculation of the volume of floodwater that could be accommodated, and no suggestion that surface water could disappear hundreds of kilometres into the mantle within a few months. What it describes is part of Earth’s deep-water cycle, driven by plate tectonics and operating over geological time. Indeed, the direction of transport in the authors’ model is exactly the reverse of the “fountains of the great deep”: hydrated rocks are carried from the ocean floor into the mantle, where some of their bound water is eventually released.

Nor did the researchers carbon-date the diamond. The paper contains no radiocarbon measurement at all. Carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,730 years, making radiocarbon dating useful for formerly living material up to roughly 50,000–55,000 years old under ordinary conditions. It cannot determine whether a diamond formed hundreds of millions or billions of years ago, and mantle carbon does not necessarily begin with the atmospheric carbon-14 ratio required for conventional radiocarbon dating.

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

Mesocyon coryphaeus in its natural setting

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Mesocyon coryphaeus hunting.

Image credit: Roger Witter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstruction of Musango matusadonaensis in its natural setting

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Based on an illustration by Mark Witton.

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

© Mark Witton 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - People Were Painting and Drawing On Cave Walls in France Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume, Dordogne© Centre des monuments nationaux/Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France

Photo: Anne Maigret

VIS light photography of the selected panel at the “Carrefour” of the panels no. 13 and 14 composed of a reindeer and a horse as well as bison and possibly a deer, respectively, and the schematic Bison 15.

© Anne Maigret, C2RMF
From: Reiche, I., Coquinot, Y., Trosseau, A. et al. (2023)

First absolute dating of Palaeolithic paintings in the Dordogne | CNRS

For the first time, scientists have obtained direct radiocarbon dates for Palaeolithic paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume in what is now southwestern France. A black-line drawing of a bison was created between 13,461 and 13,162 calibrated years before present (cal BP), while two parts of a mask-like figure produced dates ranging from about 16,000 to 14,200 cal BP. In other words, people were producing accomplished works of art in France more than 3,000 years before even the upper limit of 10,000 years that young-Earth creationists commonly allow for the entire age of Earth.

Not that this evidence is likely to persuade many creationists to reconsider their beliefs, of course. Once a preferred conclusion has been declared infallible, any evidence that contradicts it can simply be dismissed as fraudulent, mistaken or somehow “wrong”. One stock evasion is the evidence-free suggestion that radioactive decay rates must once have been different. In the case of radiocarbon dating, even known variations in atmospheric carbon-14 are measured and incorporated into the calibration curves. But no amount of calibration can correct a chronology that is wrong by design.

For anyone more interested in discovering the truth than in finding excuses to protect a preordained conclusion, however, these paintings are fascinating glimpses into how members of our species perceived the world around them, with its bison, horses, cave lions, mammoths and other Ice Age animals. Having visited the Grotte du Pech Merle in the Lot and the Lascaux II faithful reproduction of the famous Lascaux cave in the Dordogne, I can testify to the breathtaking magnificence of these monumental works.

Their purpose can only be surmised. They may have formed part of rituals intended to influence or appropriate the power of the animals; they may have recorded stories, conveyed knowledge or helped to instruct younger members of the group. None of these interpretations can yet be demonstrated conclusively. A controversial paper published in 1998 compared certain features of Upper Palaeolithic cave art with drawings made by a young autistic child with exceptional artistic ability. It did not, however, establish that any particular Palaeolithic artist was autistic.

During my visit to Pech Merle, our guide suggested that one of the great animal friezes might have been drawn in a matter of hours by a single artist, using bold, confident lines in black pigment. That interpretation may remain speculative, but the powers of observation, memory and control evident in those sweeping lines are unmistakable.

The new dating study was carried out on paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, by an interdisciplinary research team led by CNRS researcher Ina Reiche. Direct radiocarbon dating had previously been considered impossible because the black pigments used at Font-de-Gaume, Lascaux and other decorated caves in the region were assumed to consist solely of iron and manganese oxides, which contain no carbon. However, the absence of carbon had never actually been demonstrated.

Using non-invasive Raman microspectrometry and hyperspectral imaging, the researchers examined black-line drawings of a bison and a figure interpreted as a human or animal face, or “mask”. These techniques revealed that charcoal was distributed uniformly throughout the black lines, rather than occurring only in isolated patches, helping to rule out contamination from graffiti or tourist activity.

Creationism Refuted - How Humans Modified Wild Rice - Because 'The Creator' Didn't Know What We Needed?

Paddy fields in Vietnam with people transplanting rice.

Dave Mckay/Alamy Stock Photo

Different varieties of rice grown today

By IRRI Images - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_2039-77,
CC BY 2.0, Link

One grain to rule them all: the history of rice as a global food

A point made several times in these blog posts is that the creationist interpretation of Genesis presents the living world as having been deliberately created for human use. That raises an obvious question: why have humans needed to modify virtually every domesticated animal and cultivated plant to make it more useful?

In many cases, selective breeding has altered organisms so extensively that modern breeds and crop varieties are barely recognisable as descendants of their wild ancestors. Did the supposed creator fail to anticipate how humans would use them, or was it simply incapable of finishing the job and obliged to leave the improvements to us?

Creationists have never produced a satisfactory, evidence-based answer. Instead, they appeal to “mystery”, “unknowable intentions” or some other form of theological evasion — ways of avoiding the question while pretending to have answered it. Alternatively, they simply ignore the problem and continue asserting that Genesis provides an accurate account of history and the origins of living species.

Rice, of course, doesn't get a mention in the Bible, the cultural origins of whose authors were primarily the Tigris-Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia and later the Nile in Egypt, where wheat and barley were the staple crops, so they knew nothing of the origins or cultivation of rice, nor of India or China for that matter. Wheat by contrast is mentioned in the Bible 51 times and barley, 37.

Science, by contrast, allows us to reconstruct increasingly detailed and testable histories of domesticated animals and cultivated plants. Genetics, archaeology and the study of ancient plant remains show how humans selected heritable variations and gradually changed wild populations through artificial selection, hybridisation and the movement of crops between regions. One particularly fascinating example is the origin and cultivation of Asian rice, Oryza sativa, which now provides sustenance for more than 3.5 billion people.

The evidence traces this history across a timescale wholly incompatible with the creationist belief in a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth. Wild rice ancestral to modern cultivated rice was growing in the lower Yangtze region of China about 100,000 years ago. Humans began gathering and processing it approximately 24,000 years ago, and evidence of pre-domestication cultivation appears about 13,000 years ago. By around 11,000 years ago, plant remains show a rapid increase in characteristics associated with domestication, as generations of human selection transformed wild rice into a recognisably cultivated crop.

There is also evidence of rice cultivation in the Ganges valley of northern India as early as 6500 BCE—about 8,500 years ago. The details remain a subject of legitimate scientific debate, particularly whether Indian rice was domesticated independently and how much the eventual development of indica rice owed to hybridisation between local rice and japonica introduced from China. What is not in dispute is that modern rice emerged through a prolonged history of cultivation, selection, migration and hybridisation — not through an instantaneous act of creation.

The history of rice is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Garritt C. Van Dyk, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His article is reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

How Evolution Works - The Founder Effect

The brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis

Photo: USGS

Photo: USGS

Study: Hidden genetic diversity may have helped inbred brown tree snakes take over Guam - University at Buffalo

Biological invasions present evolutionary biologists with an apparent paradox. A newly established population may begin with only a handful of individuals and therefore contain only a small sample of the genetic variation present in its parent population. The resulting population bottleneck should increase inbreeding, reduce its capacity to adapt and expose harmful recessive mutations to natural selection. In extreme cases, the population should succumb to what population geneticists call an “extinction vortex”, in which declining genetic diversity and declining population size reinforce one another.

And yet some introduced species do precisely the opposite. They survive, proliferate and overwhelm the ecosystems into which they have been introduced. Few examples are more spectacular—or more ecologically destructive—than the brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis, on the Pacific island of Guam.

Native to Australia, Papua New Guinea and other parts of the western Pacific, brown tree snakes probably reached Guam as accidental stowaways in military cargo sometime after the Second World War. The invading population is believed to have been founded by only a handful of snakes. Nevertheless, their descendants multiplied until, in some parts of the island, densities reached an extraordinary 30,000 snakes per square mile.

The consequences for Guam’s wildlife have been catastrophic. As nocturnal, generalist predators encountering abundant prey that had evolved without such a snake, they devastated the island’s native birds, causing several species to disappear from the wild on Guam. They have also disrupted food webs, preyed upon reptiles and small mammals and caused hundreds of power cuts by climbing electricity infrastructure.

But how did a population founded by so few individuals avoid collapsing under the burden of inbreeding?

A new paper in Science Advances by Christopher A. Osborne of the University at Buffalo and colleagues from Buffalo and the US Geological Survey suggests that the answer lies partly in a form of genetic variation that earlier sequencing methods tended to miss.

The snakes did not, in fact, avoid the bottleneck. Their genomes retain compelling evidence of it. The researchers found that roughly half of each snake’s genome consisted of long “runs of homozygosity”—regions in which the copies inherited from the mother and father were almost identical. This is a genomic signature of intense inbreeding, comparable with that seen in some endangered species of conservation concern.

However, genetic diversity is not confined to changes in individual DNA letters. Using long-read sequencing, which can detect much larger differences, the researchers found nearly 19,000 structural variants. These included sections of DNA that had been duplicated, deleted, inserted or rearranged. Together, these structural variants affected almost eight times as much of the genome as the single-nucleotide variants upon which conventional estimates of genetic diversity have largely relied.

More importantly, the surviving variation was not distributed randomly. Structural variants were especially abundant around gene promoters and in genes associated with adaptive immunity and olfaction. Variation in immune genes could help the snakes respond to pathogens, while variation affecting their highly developed sense of smell could influence their ability to recognise prey, exploit different foods and distinguish closely related snakes from potential prey. In other words, a population can be genetically impoverished overall while retaining disproportionately important variation in precisely those parts of its genome that influence survival and adaptability.

Refuting Creationism - Ceremonial Rituals In An Australian Cave - 15,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago, Cloggs Cave, Victoria, Australia.

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Microscopic plant remains reveal 25,000 years of GunaiKurnai rituals deep in a Victorian cave

A point I have made before in this blog is that the ignorance of the Bible’s authors is revealed as clearly by what they omitted as by what they included. When examined in the light of modern science, many of their claims turn out to be wrong, showing that they filled gaps in their knowledge with stories that reflected the prevailing superstitions of their culture. Meanwhile, the omissions reveal just how narrow their geographical and intellectual horizons were.

There is no unmistakable fact in the Bible that could not have been known, inferred or imagined by people living in the ancient Near East when its various books were written. There is no knowledge that required revelation from an omniscient being and no awareness of vast regions, peoples or periods of history lying beyond the experience of its human authors.

That is entirely understandable if the Bible is a collection of human writings. It is much more difficult to explain if its ultimate author was an omniscient god. Such an author would not have shared the cosmological limitations of ancient people or presented the world in the familiar ancient Near Eastern form found in Genesis: primordial waters divided by a firmament, dry land beneath it, and the Sun, Moon and stars placed in that firmament as lights. Whatever ingenious reinterpretations modern apologists may retrofit to the text, there is nothing in it that anticipates the real structure, age or scale of the Universe.

Nor is there any hint that people were already living on the other side of the planet. Archaeological evidence from Madjedbebe in northern Australia indicates human occupation by about 65,000 years ago. The Bible’s authors knew nothing of Australia, its First Peoples or the tens of thousands of years of human history that had already elapsed before the supposed events of Genesis.

What is perhaps more surprising is that educated adults today can still imagine that the Genesis creation myth is an accurate and inerrant account of history, despite its demonstrable errors and enormous omissions. The text contains no Australia, no Americas, no Pacific peoples and no conception of the deep human past—only the restricted world known to its authors, projected onto the entire planet.

Augustine of Hippo provides an illuminating example of how treating Scripture as historical fact could obstruct an otherwise rational consideration of the evidence. Contrary to a common misconception, Augustine did not insist that Earth was flat. By his time, its spherical shape had been understood by educated Greeks and Romans for centuries, and Augustine was prepared to concede that it might be demonstrated scientifically.

What he could not accept was that the far side of a spherical Earth might be inhabited, because that appeared irreconcilable with the biblical claim that every human descended from a single original man—and, after the supposed global flood, from Noah and his family. In De Civitate Dei, he wrote:

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

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Reconstruction of Miyumba chrisdickmani in its natural setting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - How Storms Created A Dinosaur Fossil Site - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Graphical abstract

Fanti, Federico; Consorti, Lorenzo; Muscioni, Marco; et al (2026) (CC BY 4.0)

Tethyshadros insularis and crocodilians struggle against a violent monsoon storm.

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Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site

Young-Earth creationists are fond of pointing out that a single flood or storm can deposit a layer of sediment very quickly, as though this somehow proves that the entire geological record could have been produced during the mythical year-long flood described in Genesis. But the speed with which an individual layer forms tells us nothing about the intervals between successive layers. When those layers contain regular, measurable cycles produced by processes operating daily, fortnightly and seasonally, they become a record of elapsed time—and that time cannot simply be waved away.

An article in The Conversation by palaeontologist Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of University College London describes just such a record. It concerns the Villaggio del Pescatore fossil site near Trieste, north-eastern Italy, where dinosaurs, crocodilians, fish, shrimps, plants and other organisms were preserved with exceptional detail about 80 million years ago.

Chiarenza and his colleagues, led jointly with Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna, have published their findings in the journal Global and Planetary Change. Their evidence shows that the site was not, as previously proposed, a quiet lake or sinkhole. It was a tropical tidal flat on the edge of an ancient sea, repeatedly affected by powerful monsoon floods and tropical cyclones.

The fossil-bearing limestone consists of metre-thick packages containing thousands of discrete, paper-thin light and dark layers. These had previously been interpreted as annual deposits, or varves. However, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scanning, microscopic and geochemical analyses, and statistical analysis of the repeating patterns revealed something still more remarkable: the layers are tidal microcouplets, laid down under a semidiurnal tidal regime—two tidal cycles each day.

Moreover, variations in the thickness of the layers follow the familiar fortnightly alternation between spring and neap tides. The rocks therefore contain not merely a succession of vaguely similar bands, but an ordered astronomical rhythm produced by the interaction of Earth’s rotation with the orbit of the Moon. By counting and analysing those layers, the researchers calculated that the fossil-bearing succession accumulated over approximately 40 years. In other words, the rock preserves an almost day-by-day record extending across four decades.

That presents creationists with a problem that cannot be dismissed by claiming that “floods can deposit sediment rapidly”. Of course they can; that is precisely what some of the layers record. But a single flood cannot manufacture 40 years’ worth of successive twice-daily tidal deposits, arranged in the correct fortnightly spring–neap pattern. Still less can the supposed year-long biblical flood accommodate a geological sequence that records some 40 years of tides within one small part of a vastly larger, 80-million-year-old succession.

How Evolution Works - Shell Shock For Creationists

Steinkern (internal mould) of Maclurites neritoides containing cryptic fauna cornulitids, bryozoans, and graptolites (arrows).

Credit: Vinn, O., Wilson, M.A., Tinn, O. et al. (2026)

Empty seashells became new habitats 470 million years ago | University of Tartu

A paper just published in Scientific Reports by an international team led by Olev Vinn of the University of Tartu, Estonia, provides a lovely illustration of the opportunistic nature of evolution.

Some 470 million years ago — almost 470 million years before creationists’ mythical ‘Creation Week’ — a seemingly modest ecological innovation occurred in the oceans: animals began using the sheltered interiors of empty mollusc shells as habitats. This happened during the Middle Ordovician, following the Cambrian radiation, and helped to establish a new ecological niche that remains important in marine ecosystems today.

Creationists like to misrepresent the Cambrian radiation as the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animals without ancestors. In reality, it was neither instantaneous nor without an evolutionary prehistory. It unfolded over tens of millions of years and grew out of changes already under way among the preceding Ediacaran biota, including increasing mobility, burrowing and ecological interaction.

As animals became more mobile, predation intensified and defensive structures became increasingly advantageous. Mineralised skeletons and shells evolved independently in several lineages, probably under several interacting pressures, including protection, structural support and changing ocean chemistry. Molluscs were among the groups that acquired shells, and their subsequent diversification produced such familiar forms as gastropods, bivalves and shelled cephalopods.

One consequence was the growing accumulation of empty shells on the seabed. Each dead mollusc left behind a hard surface and a sheltered cavity that other organisms could potentially exploit. Yet the researchers found that, throughout the Cambrian, the interiors of mollusc shells and other skeletal remains remained free of encrusting animals, even though organisms capable of living on surfaces inside other cavities already existed.

That changed during the Middle Ordovician, when attached animals began colonising the relatively large, spacious shells of nautiloid cephalopods. They later spread into the empty shells of gastropods and bivalves. No foresight or planning was required: once organisms capable of settling inside these shells gained access to a protected surface supplied with food-bearing water, any heritable tendency that improved their ability to exploit it could be favoured by natural selection.