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Amazing Facts

Amazing Animals
February 28, 2011
Three recent articles about amazing animals and fossils deserve entries of their own, but due to lack of time, will be corralled here lest, like strays, they wander off. Turtle navigation:  Wired Science has a beautiful photo of a marine turtle in an article about how they achieve a difficult navigational skill: determining longitude from […]
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Darwin and Evolution

New Cambrian Fossil: Missing Link?
February 23, 2011
A weird animal from Chinese Cambrian strata looks like a worm with legs, the whole body studded with spines.  Was it on the way to becoming an arthropod?  The authors think so, but other members of its group were already known from the Cambrian fossil record.     The “walking cactus” with ten pairs of […]
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Darwin and Evolution

New Ediacaran Fossils: Do They Ignite the Cambrian Explosion?
February 17, 2011
Well-preserved fossils of seaweed-like colonies have been reported from China.  They are dated by the scientists at 600 million years old, from the Ediacaran period.  Can these be missing links, lighting the fuse of biodiversity that culminated in the Cambrian explosion?     PhysOrg summarized the findings published in Nature.1  “In addition to perhaps ancient […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Bizarre Fossils Raise Questions
February 8, 2011
For decades, students have been taught that the fossil record shows a long, slow, gradual progression of increasing complexity over millions of years.  Scientific data are usually not so simple. Surprising youth in old fossil:  When you see the word unexpected in a headline, expect the unexpected.  “Unexpected exoskeleton remnants found in Paleozoic fossils,” reported […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Fossils by Faith
February 4, 2011
Fossils are real artifacts you can hold in your hand.  The stories behind them are not.  How does science connect the one with the other?  Sometimes, it requires faith in incredible stories. Stay, sis:  Darwin portrayed a world in flux, with natural selection continually sifting and amplifying minute changes over time.  Why, then did Science […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Bones Crack Open Surprises: Original Tissue
January 30, 2011
Nature is kind.  That’s nice to know; but what was the context of the statement in New Scientist?  “Occasionally, though, nature is kind and fossilisation preserves details of an animal’s soft tissue.”  But has nature been kind for tens of millions of years?  In an article called “Soft-centred fossils reveal dinosaurs’ true colours,” Jeff Hecht […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Cute Dinosaur Forced to Support Evolution
January 14, 2011
Knee-high to a human, little Eodromaeus looks like a pet, but its discoverers are making the claim that it represents an early stage in dinosaur evolution.  Do the facts support this claim?     National Geographic announced a “nasty little predator from dinosaur dawn found.”  The BBC News said that Eodromaeus, whose name means “dawn […]
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Cell Biology

Astrobiologists Explain Cambrian Explosion Using Invisible Data
January 7, 2011
According to PhysOrg and Astrobio.net, the skeletons to the Cambrian Explosion1 are hidden in the Precambrian closet, out of sight, even though the closet is open for inspection.  We mustn’t be fooled into thinking there was a Creation event, because evolution was doing its work in secret, like magic: The first instance of biomineralization – […]
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Early Man

“Primitive” Humans Were Sailors
January 6, 2011
Greek archaeologists have found stone tools on Crete thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old, reported PhysOrg.  If so, the makers had to sail to get there.  “Crete has been separated from the mainland for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have traveled there by sea (a distance of […]
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