Refuting Creationism - More Detail on The Evolution of the Mamalian Jaw and Middle Ear Bones - 17 Million Years before 'Creation Week'

Brasilodon quadrangularis and Riograndia guaibensis in their natural environment

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Riograndia and Brasilodon

Jorge Blanco

September: Brazilian fossils | News and features | University of Bristol

As I confidently predicted in the conclusion to my last blog post, that might have been that day's casual refutation of creationism, but another would be along shortly.

Of course, I can't claim any credit for such an easy prediction because refutations of creationism are ten-a-penny in scientific literature, occurring often multiple times a day, simply by revealing facts that run counter to creationist claims.

This particular refutation deals with the discovery that the precursor to the mammalian jaw joint and middle ear bones occurred several times with this particular one appearing in the fossil record about 17 million years ago. The mammalian middle ear bones or ossicles are a modification of the reptilian jaw and the single reptilian middle ear bone.

Refuting Creationism - Early Mammals Lived Longer 200-150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life reconstruction of two coexisting species from the Late Jurassic period in Portugal, showing aspects of their life history. - On the left is a parent of the early mammal Dryolestes which raises a brood after reaching sexual maturity at age four. On the right is a Haldanodon, a member of the family of mammal-like docodonts, before fully reaching the mammalian evolutionary level; the creature's lifespan was eleven to fourteen years.

© Image: James Brown/© Pam Gill.

Artist’s impression of Dryolestes on a stegosaur tail spike.

Early Mammals Lived Longer — University of Bonn

New technology has enabled a team of scientists to examine in microscopic detail, the growth rings in the root cement of the fossilised teeth of early mammals, and to make a surprising discovery - the earliest mammals lived considerably longer than equivalent-sized mammals do today, but they took longer to reach sexual maturity.

These growth rings are like those of trees and record the annual growth of the mammal. They can be seen using a technique called synchrotron X-ray tomography in which electrons are accelerated to near light-speed. This means that like x-rays they can penetrate solid objects such as fossils and bone, which do not need to be cut into thin slices, and like an electron microscope, because electrons have such short wave-lengths, they can resolve much finer structures, hence these microscopic growth rings become visible.

Creationism in Crisis - How Dinosaurs Evolved Feathers

Latest News and Views from University College Cork

Psittacorus (reconstruction)

Artwork by Walter Myers

This paper is enough to send a dedicated creationist disinformation specialist into intellectual summersaults. On the one hand, they hate the fact that dinosaurs lived so long ago and are evidence of life on earth tens and hundreds of millions of years ago, so they bend over backwards to prove they were around just a few thousand years ago, and then, horror of horrors, along come some clever scientists and show evidence that some dinosaurs even evolved into birds!

And now, courtesy of Palaeontologists at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland , we have evidence of the transition from scales to feathers in pre-avian dinosaurs.


But it gets even worse! Creationists frauds have ben claiming for several years now that 'fossilised' soft dinosaur tissues prove they were just a few thousand years old because, despite the perfectly rational explanation of how 'soft' tissues can be preserved for many millions of years in the right circumstances, like the presence of iron, the evidence of this transition from scales to feathers would found in fossilised soft tissue!

So, a creationist disinformation specialist must now argue that fossilised dinosaur soft tissues don't exist, and when they do, they prove dinosaurs lived recently. One problem they face is that the fossilised skin isn't skin at all, or even the fibrous protein parts of skin; it has been entirely mineralised aa silicate, preserving only the morphology, including the surface patterning - which is where the evidence lies.

The University College Cork scientists have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications and in a UCC news release: