Feeding hagfish
Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Showing posts with label Transitional Forms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transitional Forms. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 June 2026
Friday, 24 April 2026
Creationism Refuted - Why Snakes, Like Creationists, Don't Have A Leg To Stand On - Evolution
Najash rionegrina
AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)
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.
Thursday, 16 April 2026
Creationism Refuted - The Transition From Cold-Blooded to Warm-Blooded Mammal Ancestors
AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)
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:
Tuesday, 7 April 2026
Refuting Creationism - Transitional Fossils From Before The Cambrian 'Explosion'
Reconstruction of Jiangchuan biota
Credit: Xiaodong Wang.
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.
Tuesday, 27 January 2026
Refuting Creationism - How The Transitional Ediacaran Biota Slowly Evolved Into The Cambrian Biota
Ediacaran fossils
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.
Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Creationism Refuted - How The Mammalian Ear Evolved - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'
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.
Saturday, 10 January 2026
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.
© Hamza Mehimdate, Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca.
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.
Sunday, 4 January 2026
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.
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.
Thursday, 1 January 2026
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.
© Georgalis and Jones
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.The discovery and its broader significance were explained in a recent Natural History Museum news item by James Ashworth.
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.
“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.
A living link to the past?
The backbones of Paradoxophidion are surprisingly similar to those of Acrochordus snakes.
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:
Taken together, the geology of Hordle Cliff leaves no room for creationist evasions. The sediments accumulated slowly in warm, shallow Eocene seas, preserving stable marine ecosystems over millions of years. The fossils are local, ordered, and ecologically coherent, embedded within undisturbed strata that fit seamlessly into the wider geological history of southern England and the global Eocene record. None of this resembles the chaotic aftermath of a recent global catastrophe; all of it is exactly what conventional geology predicts.
The newly identified fossil from this site simply adds to the embarrassment. It is neither out of place nor out of time, but sits precisely where evolutionary theory says it should—both stratigraphically and anatomically—displaying the familiar mosaic of ancestral and derived features that creationists insist do not exist. Hordle Cliff has been yielding such transitional forms for over two centuries, and every one of them tells the same story.
For creationism, this presents a recurring and insoluble problem. Each new discovery must be dismissed, distorted, or ignored, not because it is anomalous, but because it fits too well. Hordle Cliff is not an exception to the rule; it is the rule itself—one more quietly devastating reminder that the natural world records its own history with remarkable consistency, and that history bears no resemblance whatsoever to a Bronze Age flood myth.
Advertisement
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
Saturday, 1 November 2025
Refuting Creationism - Ancient Teeth Show Mixed Origins Of A Transitional Hominin - 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'
Parathropus robustus (Artist's impression)
Bary Davies, RCA
Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.
If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.
But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.
However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.
And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.
Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.
Saturday, 25 October 2025
Creationism Refuted - Now It's A Transitional Dinosaur - Khankhuuluu The Dragon Prince
An artist's impression of the newly discovered dinosaur
Julius Csotonyi
Two new papers announced today will have creationists scratching their heads as they try to decide which technique for dismissing them will meet with the most approval from their fellow cultists.
The first, in Nature, concerns yet another of those supposedly non-existent transitional fossils which, because Charles Darwin predicted they would be found, must be dismissed at all costs. It comes in the form of an 86-million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Mongolia that is intermediate between the small, fleet-footed predatory dinosaurs and the larger apex predators — the tyrannosaurs.
The usual creationist response is to declare that these intermediate fossils are “not transitional; they are fully formed, created species.” Of course, that doesn’t explain why species that are intermediate between ancestral and descendant species show a mosaic of features from both. Presumably, given their parody of evolution — in which evolution is imagined as a single event where one species suddenly turns into another — they expect an intermediate to be half one and half the other: the equivalent of the “crocoduck” or a chimpanzee with a human head. In reality, this discovery shows exactly what we would expect from the fossil record of tyrannosaur evolution 86 million years ago.
It's also important to creationism that the so-called 'missing link' stays missing. It is only ever referred to in the singular and refers to some supposed link between apes and humans, and it is definitely not one of the many archaic African hominins. But of course, every fossil is the 'link' or transitional form between its parents and its offspring because evolution is a process, not the parody event of creationism, evolving species form a continuum, and this discovery from Mongolia is no exception.
Thursday, 14 August 2025
Refuting Creationism - Another Plethora of Transitional Fossils - From 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'
An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the late Permian in the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. The scene includes several saber-toothed gorgonopsians and beaked dicynodonts.
Gabriel Ugueto
The fossils are the result of 15 years of excavation at three sites in Africa and cover the 47-million-year Permian era, which ended with the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — the mass extinction at the end of the Permian in which an estimated 70% of species became extinct. Not only is that timeline fatal to those creationists who like to imagine the Earth and life on it are just 6,000 to 10,000 years old, but the fact of a mass extinction raises insurmountable problems for intelligent design advocates. They would need to explain the intelligence behind designing species only to have them wiped out by a climate catastrophe — one which should have been anticipated by an omniscient designer and could have been prevented by an omnipotent god.
And of course, another problem for creationists is the abundance of these transitional fossils, which, according to creationist dogma, should not exist at all.
Sunday, 10 August 2025
Refuting Creationism - Ancestors Of Mammals Lived 40 Million Years Earlier Than We Thought.
Docodontids in their natural setting
AI-generated image (ChatGPT)
A student palaeontologist, Sofia Patrocínio, from the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Lisbon (Nova FCT), has identified a fossil tooth as belonging to a docodontan – a group of mammaliform vertebrates considered close relatives and ancestors of true mammals. This discovery pushes back the known origin of this group by a further 40 million years.
This is the sort of find that often prompts headlines seemingly designed to play into the hands of anti-science groups such as creationists, with claims like *“The science books will need to be rewritten”* or *“Everything you thought you knew about evolution was wrong!”* These sensationalist lines risk creating the false impression that scientists are constantly realising they were “wrong all along”.
In reality – as in this case – what has happened is that a gap in our knowledge has been filled. Our understanding is now slightly more complete than before. Rather than overturning evolutionary theory, this discovery fits perfectly within it, supporting what was already known: there was a gradual transition from small reptiles to early mammals. The main uncertainty was *when* certain steps in that transition occurred.
Creationists who seize on such discoveries to claim scientists are forever changing their minds overlook an inconvenient detail – the timeline. Nearly all of these fossil finds involve organisms that lived hundreds of thousands, even millions of years before creationists believe the Earth and life began. If anything needs rewriting, it’s the creationist books that peddle disinformation to those willing to pay for material that reassures them their preconceived beliefs are correct – even when the evidence says otherwise.
Sofia Patrocínio and her colleagues have recently published their findings in the journal of the Palaeontological Association, Papers in Palaeontology. The discovery is also covered in a news article from Nova FCT, published in Almadense.
What Were Docodontans? Docodontans were small, extinct mammaliforms that lived during the Jurassic period, between about 201 and 145 million years ago. Although not true mammals, they were close relatives and part of the larger group from which mammals evolved.
They are best known from their distinctive teeth, which had complex cusps adapted for an omnivorous diet of insects, plants, and other small food sources. Fossils suggest docodontans were shrew-like in size and appearance, with some adapted to specialised habitats – including burrowing, climbing, and even semi-aquatic lifestyles.
The group is important to palaeontologists because their anatomy preserves key stages in the evolution from reptile-like synapsids to the first true mammals. Discoveries like the one by Sofia Patrocínio help refine our understanding of when and how early mammal traits emerged.
Nova FCT student identified a new ancestor of mammals from a two-millimeter tooth
The fossil measures less than seven millimeters in total and is partially hidden in a rock. However, meticulous work has identified a new species that combines the name of a goddess with that of a constellation. The new species pushes back the emergence of this group of animals by 40 million years.
After several years of researching a molar tooth from an animal that might resemble a mouse and several months until she was able to publish the scientific article, Sofia Patrocínio "closed" this cycle on Friday, June 13, 2025. The result presented in the scientific journal Papers in Palaeontology owes nothing to bad luck, but it does have its share of incidents, as the paleontologist told ALMADENSE.
"There's a funny story from high school: I had to do a project on paleontology and got a failing grade; I was so upset I said it wouldn't happen again," she says in a relaxed conversation, while admitting that she loves what she does. And she does a lot of things, even though many of them aren't even paid. "Paleontology isn't seen as a serious profession." Something she's determined to change.
Sofia Patrocínio is from Cartaxo and graduated in Environmental Education and Nature Tourism. It's been more than half a dozen years since she enrolled in the program, but the price of student housing elsewhere was unaffordable (then, as it is now) , and it was one of the factors that forced her to stay closer to home and enroll at the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém. After that, she interned at Dino Parque da Lourinhã and stayed on to work there.
“It was them [my colleagues at Dino Parque] who encouraged me to do a master's degree in Paleontology at Nova; they said I had a knack for it,” he says, referring to the course at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Lisbon (Nova FCT), which has a campus in the parish of Caparica, Almada.
It was impossible to remove the fossil from the rock due to the risk of damaging it. In the center of the image, the yellowish structure corresponds to the dentary (mandible), and the dark structure is the partially visible molar.Photo: Sofia Patrocínio
In one of her master's degree courses, Vertebrate Paleontology, Sofia Patrocínio and her colleagues were challenged to prepare and describe fossils, some from the Lourinhã Museum collection and some from an excavation in Greenland. The then-master's student worked with needles and a microscope to remove the sediments still clinging to the fossil, which was less than seven millimeters long —even so, she was unable to free the entire piece, as we will see.
She then described the fossil in detail and attempted to identify its group and its phylogenetic relationships with other animal groups—in other words, she attempted to place the animal in its proper position on the tree of life. "It had similarities with several groups, but didn't seem to belong to any. It was most likely a new species," says the researcher. "I had so much study material that I could have continued [with the same topic] for my master's degree."
How does a tooth allow us to identify a new species?
The first step was to include the species in the order Docodonta, a group of mammaliforms—the evolutionary predecessors of mammals—with very distinctive molars. To put it simply, the molars were long and low, with a characteristic cusp pattern. (Cusps are the conical protrusions on molars, which we also have.) But this particular tooth had characteristics that didn't fit into any of the previously known genera or species within docodonts.
Docodont fossils are very rare, but there are fossils with entire jaws, which allowed comparison with the available material and ruled out a tooth with a small defect. "If it were just a change in the tooth's morphology, there might be doubt, but I counted five to seven differences," explains Sofia Patrocínio. Among these differences was a cusp facing the tongue.
While the tooth's original pattern allowed it to be classified as a new species, the layer in which it was found offers another new discovery. To determine the age of fossils, paleontologists "measure" the age of rocks found in the same layer. In this case, the fossil would have formed about 200 million years ago, during the transition between the Triassic and Jurassic periods (the period in which a wide variety of easily recognizable dinosaurs emerged). Even more interesting is that this species would have appeared 40 million years before the oldest known docodont species.
A new species at the transition between pre-docodont mammals and docodonts adds another piece to the puzzle of mammalian evolution, particularly the order Docodonta, which diversified and occupied various environments at the same time as large dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Furthermore, this fossil places the origin of docodonts in Greenland and Europe—connected before the continents separated into their current positions—rather than Russia and Asia as previously thought.
The layers of soil containing the fossils are like shelves in a bookcase, each corresponding to a period of time. By exploring each shelf as if reading the books stored there, the scientists were able to date the layer and the fossils—among them a new species of dinosaur, Plateosaurus trossingensis, identified by a fellow student in Sofia's master's program — and also describe the environment. The fossils were found in an ancient lake, with little oxygen in the water and which served as a passageway for many animals.
200 million years ago, when the 'Nujalikodon cassiopeiae' fossil is believed to have formed, what are now Greenland and Europe were connected, and also in contact with the continental plates of North America and Asia.Adapted from: Patrocínio et al. (2025) Papers in Paleontology
A goddess tooth named after a constellation
Now 25, Sofia Patrocínio boasts the identification of a new species on her resume. "It's strange; it seems like it hasn't sunk in yet." Whoever discovers a new species can give it a name, naturally following the rules used by the scientific community. A species always has two Latin names (first the genus name, which functions almost like our surnames, and then the "proper name" that conveys the distinctive characteristic), as defined by the scientist Carlos Linnaeus in the mid-18th century.
This new docodont was named Nujalikodon cassiopeiae . Nujalik is the goddess of the earth hunt in Inuit mythology—the indigenous population of the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland—and "nujalikodon" means "Nujalik's tooth." The specific epithet cassiopeiae owes its name to the constellation Cassiopeia, whose five stars appear to form a W, like the cusps of the molar Sofia Patrocínio studied.
Naming the species requires all the prior work of studying fossils, in this case a complete molar, the piece of bone that housed the tooth, and the broken roots of a second tooth. But a large portion of the fossil was not visible; it was still embedded within the rock, and removing it could irreparably damage the tooth. Furthermore, it was extremely small, the molar measuring only two millimeters. Therefore, a scan of the fossil was necessary—a kind of CT scan for very small objects—which was very difficult to achieve, says the researcher. "But without the scan, it was impossible to move forward, nor to submit the article for publication." Then, using the 831 photographs from the scan—as if the fossil had been cut into very thin slices—a three-dimensional model was created on the computer, allowing us to see the details hidden within the rock.
The 831 photographs taken by the scan allowed a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fossil measuring just seven millimeters.Adapted from Patrocínio et al. (2025) Papers in Paleontology
Sofia Patrocínio's work was supported by her advisors, Vicente Crespo, a paleontologist at Nova FCT, and Elsa Panciroli, a researcher at the National Museum of Scotland, and involved collaboration with other researchers. The work was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, as part of the GeoBioTec project.
Having completed this stage, the paleontologist hopes to continue studying the evolution of mammalian ancestors with a doctorate from the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon. This time, she will study the inner ear—but she will continue to observe bones and very small structures. In the meantime, she will participate in paleontological excavations, collaborate with a fossil database in Portugal, and, in the activities she organizes for Ciência Viva, try to spark children's interest in paleontology.
Publication:
ABSTRACTThis fossil tooth extends the known existence of docodontans by around 40 million years, placing them much earlier in the evolutionary timeline than previously documented. This is significant because:
The first mammaliaforms emerged in the Late Triassic, but their exact origins remain unclear due to the scarcity of fossils from this period. One of the earliest diverging mammaliaform groups, the order Docodonta, became unusually ecomorphologically diverse compared with other early mammals, and this may be connected to the possession of complex molar cusp morphology. The specimen described here, found in the Rhætelv Formation of the Kap Stewart Group (Rhaetian–Sinemurian) of central East Greenland, provides novel information on docodontan origins and evolution, as well as key biogeographic insights into early mammal dispersal. Nujalikodon cassiopeiae gen. et sp. nov. is the first mammaliaform found in the Rhætelv Formation, and is likely to be Early Jurassic (Hettangian) in age. Comprising an incomplete dentary with a single preserved molar, it was visualized using micro-computed tomography; the molar bears similarities to the putative early docodontan Delsatia, and docodontan Dobunnodon. Phylogenetic analysis places Nujalikodon cassiopeiae as a basal member of Docodonta or a close sister taxon, making it one of the oldest definitive docodontans and pushing the origin of the group back to at least the Early Jurassic. It provides insights into the development of docodontan dental complexity, a key factor in their ecological diversification during the Middle to Late Jurassic. Its presence in Greenland supports the hypothesis that docodontans originated in the region now comprising Europe and Greenland before dispersing across the rest of Laurasia.
Patrocínio, S., Panciroli, E., Rotatori, F.M., Mateus, O., Milàn, J., Clemmensen, L.B. and Crespo, V.D. (2025)
The oldest definitive docodontan from central East Greenland sheds light on the origin of the clade. Pap Palaeontol, 11: e70022. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.70022
© 2025 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
- It strengthens the fossil record for the transition from reptile-like synapsids to early mammals, filling a critical gap rather than overturning existing theory.
- It confirms evolutionary predictions — that mammaliforms had already diversified long before the rise of true mammals, in line with phylogenetic models.
- It demonstrates the self-correcting nature of science — evidence leads to refinements in understanding, not wholesale abandonment of established frameworks. When the evidence changes, scientists change their minds, unlike theologians who try to change the evidence.
Rather than undermining evolution, this discovery is yet another piece of independent evidence that fits perfectly into its framework — and yet another reminder that creationist models fail when confronted with reality.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)
