Rosa Rubicondior: Transitional Forms

Showing posts with label Transitional Forms. Show all posts

Friday, 2 October 2026

Refuting Creationism - Self-Correcting Science Finds Another Transitional Fossil

A reconstruction of Westlothiana based on x-ray scans of the fossil.

Famous "First Reptile" Fossil Wasn’t a Reptile After All | AMNH

One of the supposed earliest reptiles has lost its place in the reptile family tree — and, in doing so, has provided a revealing example of how evolution works and how science improves its understanding of it. For creationists hoping that a revised classification means evolutionary biology is collapsing, the disappointment is twofold: the fossil remains approximately 345 million years old, and its newly revealed anatomy makes the transition towards life on land more interesting, not less evident.

The animal is Westlothiana lizziae, affectionately known as “Lizzie”, a small, superficially lizard-like vertebrate discovered in Scotland in 1984. Its limbs and apparently clawed digits helped establish its reputation as an early representative of the evolutionary transition towards amniotes — the group encompassing mammals and reptiles, including birds. However, interpreting a crushed fossil from its exposed surfaces has limitations. Structures hidden inside the rock can tell a different story, as researchers have now demonstrated using powerful X-ray scans at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

The two slabs of NSM G.1990.72.1, the Westlothiana fossil studied by this new research.

Photo by Roger Benson.

The research, published on 30 September in Nature reveals an unexpected combination: a skull retaining ancient anatomical features, bony supports for internal gills, and a mouth bearing thousands of tiny teeth. These are indications of an aquatic or amphibious animal. The researchers place Westlothiana among stem tetrapods, on an evolutionary branch outside the group comprising living amphibians and amniotes and their last common ancestor.

Yet Lizzie also possessed five-digit feet and superficially claw-like finger and toe bones. That combination is the significant point. Features associated with terrestrial vertebrates were already appearing in animals that retained substantial adaptations to life in water. This is an example of mosaic evolution: different parts of the body change at different rates, producing combinations that do not fit the tidy categories we recognise among living animals. It also means that claw-like impressions in ancient trackways cannot, by themselves, establish that the animals making them were early amniotes.

Refuting Creationism - A Star Is Born - And Rewrites The Story Of The Origin Of Starfish

Artist's impression of Yujingia glutenotunica

Credit: Kaiyue He, et al

A star is born: half billion-year-old fossil rewrites the origin story of starfish | University of Cambridge

One of creationism’s favourite misrepresentations of the fossil record, promulgated By Stephen S. Mayer of the Discovery Institute, is that the Cambrian ‘explosion’ was a sudden creation event, when the major animal groups appeared without evolutionary ancestors, already equipped with their modern body plans. This depends on treating ‘rapid’ in the geological sense as ‘instantaneous’, and overlooking the transitional fossils that reveal how those body plans evolved. A newly described animal from China provides another awkward example for that narrative. And of course the existence of transition fossils themselves are a major problem for creationists who insist that they don't exist because their creation myth can't accommodate them.

Named Yujingia glutenotunica, this small, soft-bodied creature lived approximately 518 million years ago. As described by Kaiyue He and colleagues in their paper in Current Biology, its combination of anatomical features places it close to the common ancestor of two groups that now look remarkably different: the echinoderms, including starfish and sea urchins, and the hemichordates, including acorn worms. Together, these constitute the animal group known as Ambulacraria.

The fossils preserve a digestive tract and feather-like feeding tentacles, together with another set of appendages that may have anchored the animal to the seabed. Crucially, Yujingia possessed an elaborate feeding apparatus without a mineralised skeleton. Its anatomy therefore supports the evolutionary interpretation that specialised feeding structures preceded some of the defining features of later echinoderms.
This is what makes transitional fossils so informative. They need not resemble an animal caught halfway through changing into a modern species, nor must they be demonstrably the direct ancestors of anything alive today. They preserve combinations of characteristics that help scientists reconstruct the order in which evolutionary changes occurred. A fully functioning animal can be transitional in its anatomy: ‘transitional’ describes its relationship to other forms, not an inability to survive until evolution has finished building it.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's A Transitional Early Insect - From 324 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Amphibious stem-insect rewrites the evolutionary history of insect terrestrialization---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

A favourite creationist debating tactic is to point to a gap in the fossil record and pretend that the absence of a known transitional form is evidence that no transition occurred. When a suitable fossil is eventually found, the manoeuvre simply creates two smaller gaps on either side of it—or the fossil is arbitrarily declared to be “fully formed” and therefore not transitional. A simple trick which exposes the ignorance and disingenuity of creationism, is to ask them to describe exactly what they would expect a transition fossil to look like. They tend to abruptly break off the debate, because to answer it would violate two unwritten rules of creationism - never consider being wrong and never state what evidence would cause you to change your mind in case it's produced.

This 'god of the gaps' rhetorical game depends upon treating an inevitably incomplete geological record as though it ought to contain a specimen from every generation of every evolving lineage - something that if it were true, would be hard for science to explain, given what we know of the circumstances in which fossils are formed, which actually predicts that the record will be discontinuous.

The early history of insects has offered particularly fertile ground for this tactic. Molecular-clock studies indicate that hexapods diverged from aquatic crustacean relatives hundreds of millions of years ago, yet their small, delicate bodies were poorly suited to fossilisation, especially in the environments through which they were making the transition onto land. Consequently, there has been a conspicuous interval—the so-called “hexapod gap”—between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the abundance of unmistakable insects in later Carboniferous rocks.

Now, an international team led by Erik Tihelka and Chenyang Cai has described a remarkable fossil that helps to narrow that gap while illustrating how the familiar insect body plan was assembled. The approximately 324-million-year-old animal, named Chosha praecursor, came from the Late Mississippian Tesnus Formation of western Texas. Collected in 1985 and long misidentified as a juvenile crustacean, it remained in a museum collection until examination under cross-polarised light revealed anatomical details that had previously been almost invisible. The findings are reported in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Hagfish By LOSS of Eye Complexity

Creationism Refuted - Why Snakes, Like Creationists, Don't Have A Leg To Stand On - Evolution

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

An ancient snake's cheekbone sheds light on evolution of modern snake skulls | Faculty of Science

Creationism is the art of ignoring evidence while pretending to be interested in it. Creationists continually demand that science provide supporting evidence for their childish parodies of evolution, abiogenesis, the Big Bang, and other scientific explanations; then, when the evidence is provided, they either ignore it, misrepresent it, or move the goalposts.

This is neatly illustrated by a paper published in Science Advances in 2019 by an international team of palaeontologists, including researchers from Argentina, the University of Alberta and McGill University. The paper provides creationists with something they are forever pretending to ask for — a transitional fossil — while also undermining another of their favourite assertions: that evolutionary change must always involve adding something new, and that loss or reduction cannot contribute to evolution.

The fossil in question belongs to Najash rionegrina, a rear-limbed fossil snake from Argentina. The presence of hind limbs is striking enough, but it is not the most important point of the paper. The fossil also shows that, during snake evolution, legs were not the only structures to be reduced or lost. The skull of Najash still retained a cheekbone — the jugal bone — which has almost entirely disappeared in living snakes.

That matters because it helps refine our understanding of how the modern snake skull evolved. Rather than appearing suddenly, fully formed and magically snake-like, the snake body plan was assembled over time through a series of anatomical changes, including elongation of the body, reduction of limbs, modification of the skull, and the loss or reduction of bones that were present in earlier ancestors. In other words, this is exactly the kind of transitional evidence creationists claim not to have seen, and exactly the kind of evolutionary reduction they claim cannot happen.

Creationism Refuted - The Transition From Cold-Blooded to Warm-Blooded Mammal Ancestors

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Mystery solved: when mammals’ ancestors became warm-blooded

If the transition from cold-bloodedness to warm-bloodedness is not a change in “kind” in the creationist sense, it is hard to imagine what would qualify. Creationists often try to dismiss major evolutionary transitions as mere “variation within a 'Kind'”, but the shift from ectothermy to endothermy was not some trivial adjustment. It was a profound physiological transformation that allowed animals to maintain a high, stable internal temperature, remain active across a wider range of conditions, and exploit ecological niches closed to their cold-blooded ancestors. Yet, according to creationist mythology, no such transition ever occurred, and there was never a point in time when it began.

Unfortunately for creationists, the evidence says otherwise. An international team of palaeontologists led by Ricardo Araújo of the Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, Romain David of the Natural History Museum, London, UK, and Kenneth D. Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, USA, believe they have identified when endothermy arose in the mammalian lineage. Their findings were published in Nature in July 2022. The team concluded that mammalian ancestors became warm-blooded about 233 million years ago, roughly 33 million years before the first true mammals appeared, and at about the same time that other recognisably mammalian traits such as fur and whiskers were evolving. The timing is consistent with evolutionary expectations that major innovations can arise in response to changing environmental pressures. [1.1]

They also concluded that this transition was rapid in geological terms, taking less than a million years rather than unfolding gradually over tens of millions of years, as had often been assumed. [2.1]

The researchers reached these conclusions by examining 3D models of the inner ears of dozens of mammalian ancestors, many from South Africa’s fossil-rich Karoo region. Karoo fossils are especially valuable because they preserve an exceptionally detailed record of synapsid evolution across almost 100 million years, documenting the transition from reptile-like therapsids to mammals. What the team focused on was the shape of the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which form part of the balance system. These canals are filled with endolymph, a fluid whose viscosity changes with temperature. As body temperature rose during the evolution of endothermy, the geometry of the canals had to change to keep the balance organ functioning properly. That gave the researchers a way to infer when warm-bloodedness first evolved in the mammalian line. [2.1]

Four of the authors of the paper in Nature also published an article in The Conversation explaining their results and their significance for understanding mammalian evolution. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, information about the Karoo fossils:

Refuting Creationism - Transitional Fossils From Before The Cambrian 'Explosion'

Reconstruction of Jiangchuan biota

Credit: Xiaodong Wang.

Spectacular fossil treasure trove pushes back origins of complex animals | University of Oxford

A paper just published in Science by a team of palaeontologists from Oxford and Yunnan universities should, if creationists were honest enough and sufficiently knowledgeable to understand it, finally lay to rest two favourite canards they use to attack Darwinian evolution: the so-called Cambrian Explosion and their misrepresentation of Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium.

The Cambrian Explosion is a favourite target for creationists, who exploit the word “explosion” to misrepresent it as the sudden appearance of multicellular life with multiple body plans, supposedly without ancestry, and therefore as a single act of supernatural creation. The fact that it happened some 535 million years ago is usually dismissed with the standard creationist repertoire: claims that scientists are inventing the dates, relying on “flawed” dating techniques, or, more bizarrely still, failing to take account of some unspecified change in radioactive decay rates that just happens to make 6,000–10,000 years look like 535 million.

But that fallacy was based on very limited data, especially the fossils from the Burgess Shale, which provided only a narrow snapshot of living organisms at one time and place. From evidence such as this, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge developed the idea of punctuated equilibrium, in which long periods of relative stasis in the fossil record are interrupted by comparatively short episodes of more rapid evolutionary change. Creationists eagerly seized on this, dishonestly presenting it as though Gould had somehow replaced Darwinism and proved Darwin wrong. In reality, it did no such thing. It was not a rejection of evolution, nor of common descent, nor of natural selection, but a discussion within evolutionary biology about the pattern and tempo with which evolutionary change appears in the fossil record.

Darwin, of course, never claimed that evolution must proceed at a constant, steady rate. On the contrary, his theory makes it clear that changing environments drive evolutionary change, so more rapid evolution during periods of environmental upheaval is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution and, indeed, a vindication of it. The appearance of long stasis followed by apparently abrupt change can also be exaggerated by the incompleteness of the geological record, in which spans of thousands of years may appear almost instantaneous when compressed into a thin layer of rock.

However, the notion that the Cambrian Explosion was a sudden event without ancestry has been steadily dismantled by discoveries pushing the origins of Cambrian-type biota back towards the Ediacaran, together with evidence that some Ediacaran organisms were already capable of movement. What emerges is not a miraculous burst of creation, but a clear evolutionary progression from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian.

Now this new paper strengthens that case by showing that complex body plans existed much earlier than previously thought, and by presenting evidence of gradual Darwinian evolution from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian.

The evidence comes from a treasure trove of fossils, the Jiangchuan Biota in Yunnan Province, southwest China, where more than 700 fossil specimens were recovered from rocks dated to between 554 and 539 million years old. Among the more surprising finds is a deuterostome — part of the broad group that includes vertebrates such as fish and humans.

Refuting Creationism - How The Transitional Ediacaran Biota Slowly Evolved Into The Cambrian Biota

Ediacaran fossils

How Did These Strange, Ancient Organisms Turn into Such Remarkable Fossils? | GSA News Release 26-01

A recent paper published in the journal Geology by three geologists from Yale, led by Dr Lidya G. Tarhan, explains how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in such exquisite detail, while the transition to the (mostly) soft-bodied Cambrian biota and the Cambrian diversification are so poorly represented in the fossil record. It turns out that this was due to the particular chemistry of Ediacaran seawater, which enabled dead organisms to be coated and encased in a fine layer of clay that protected and preserved their structure. As ocean chemistry changed, this fortuitous process became progressively less effective.

Creationists love few things more than a gap in scientific knowledge as somewhere to position their favourite god, presumably having been fooled into believing a false dichotomy — either science can currently explain it or God did it — or at least expecting their target audience to be fooled by it. Sadly for creationists, this has created an ever-decreasing number of places in which to force-fit their ever-shrinking little god, as science, with relentless, unstoppable efficiency, fills one gap after another.

One such gap which creationists regularly trot out and misrepresent is the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”, which they have been fooled into believing was a sudden event occurring at an instant in time, before which there were no multicellular organisms and after which a myriad diverse body plans all appeared overnight without ancestry.

This conveniently ignores two important facts: the pre-existing Ediacaran biota, and the fact that the Ediacaran biota transitioned into the Cambrian biota over a period of some 30 million years.

In reality, of course, there is no such gap — it exists only in the minds of those ignorant enough to believe the misrepresentation. However, there is, or rather was, a gap, and one which creationists would probably prefer not to think about. It was the lack of a good explanation for how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in the fossil record in such exquisite detail, while the Cambrian “explosion” only looks like a sudden event because so few of the (soft-bodied) transitional forms were preserved.

Certainly, once it began, the Cambrian was a period of exponential diversification during which hard body parts evolved as defensive structures such as shells, spines, and hard exoskeletons; offensive structures such as jaws; and organs of mobility such as limbs and fins. Also evolving were sense organs and nervous systems. It would have been astonishing almost beyond credibility if every step of a rapid diversification of initially soft-bodied organisms had contrived to leave a fossil record of every stage, so all we really have is an infrequent series of snapshots at discrete locations, each capturing a brief moment in a global evolutionary history lasting about 55 million years.

Creationism Refuted - How The Mammalian Ear Evolved - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammals | University of Chicago News

A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) reports the discovery that an ancestor of mammals, a cynodont called Thrinaxodon liorhinus, had ear structures derived from redundant jaw bones that probably gave it an acute sense of hearing some 250 million years ago — around 50 million years earlier than previously believed. As nocturnal animals, a well-developed sense of hearing would have been hugely advantageous.

The research, by palaeontologists from the University of Chicago, used CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.

Transitional fossils such as this are a major source of embarrassment to creationists because their Bronze Age mythology insists that all species were created fully formed, without ancestry, so there should never be any examples of species evolving or of existing structures being exapted over time for new functions.

Sadly for creationists, the fossil evidence paints an entirely different picture. It is a record of everything creationism predicts should not be there and everything evolution predicts will be. To most normal people, that sort of evidence should strongly suggest that creationism is wrong and that the Theory of Evolution is right.

It is rather like someone who does not believe in gravity stating that if you throw a stone into the air it will stay there and never fall back to Earth. A simple demonstration will establish the falsehood of that claim, just as the fossil record establishes the falsehood of creationist claims.

Creationism Refuted - Early Hominins From Morocco Confirm The African Origin of Homo Sapiens

773,000-year-old mandible ThI-GH-1 from Thomas Quarry in Morocco.

Early hominins from Thomas Quarry I (Morocco) reveal an African lineage near the root of Homo sapiens

The discovery and dating (of which more later) of hominin remains in a Moroccan quarry, reported recently in Nature, has provided further confirmation that the origin of Homo sapiens lies in Africa, not Eurasia, contrary to an alternative hypothesis that has occasionally been proposed. The material consists of mandibles and other fragmentary remains, and also sheds light on the evolutionary origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

That is not to say that any serious palaeoanthropologists believed humans evolved wholly in Eurasia. Rather, some suggested that the final stages of Homo sapiens evolution may have occurred there, derived from descendants of earlier African migrants such as H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, or H. antecessor. Others have argued that the so-called ‘muddle in the middle’ of the hominin family tree may represent a single, widely distributed species exhibiting regional variation across both Africa and Eurasia.

However, the Moroccan specimens display a clear mosaic of primitive and derived features — precisely the pattern that creationists call ‘transitional species’ and insist don't exist. These fossils combine traits seen in African sister lineages with features associated with H. antecessor, a pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan European species whose remains are being excavated at the Sima de los Huesos (Cave of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain.

The fossils are also exceptionally valuable for palaeoanthropology for another reason. The sediments in which they were found preserve the unmistakable signature of the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal, which occurred around 773,000 years ago when Earth’s magnetic poles flipped. This provides an unusually robust chronological anchor, as the timing of this reversal has been independently verified from multiple, entirely separate lines of evidence.

There is therefore a great deal here for creationists to attempt to dismiss. First, there is the mosaic of primitive and derived features that identify these fossils as genuinely transitional — something creationism insists does not exist. Second, there is the age of the material, securely dated to approximately 763,000 years (±4,000 years) before creationists insist Earth was magicked out of nothing, placing ancestral hominins hundreds of thousands of years before the Bronze Age biblical story of a single, ancestor-free human couple. Finally, and perhaps most inconveniently of all, the dating does not rely on radiometric methods at all, but on geomagnetic reversal stratigraphy, verified beyond any reasonable doubt. The biblical timeline is therefore wrong by many orders of magnitude.

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

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

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

“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.

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