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Dumb Ideas

Early Beetle Was Armed
September 23, 2007
According to Live Science, a beetle preserved in amber, dated at 100 million years old, was caught in the act of using chemical warfare.  “Soldier beetles” capable of this kind of advanced defense system were not thought to have evolved till 60 million years later.     This article contains several statements worthy of the […]
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Birds

Was Velociraptor a Dragon?
September 22, 2007
As if Velociraptor, the terror of Jurassic Park, was not scary enough, some scientists are now saying it was feathered.  (This, of course, does not imply it could fly after its human prey like some movie dragon.)  The latest claim in Science is based on the apparent presence of “quill knobs” on the radius bone […]
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Dumb Ideas

Early Reptile Had Modern Ears
September 18, 2007
Modern ears are nothing new; they go back 260 million years.  That’s the gist of a paper in PLoS ONE that reported on a Russian reptile fossil.1  The research team was surprised to discover that the creature had impedance-matched ears, a novelty thought to have evolved 50 million years later.  Somehow this innovation survived one […]
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Amazing Facts

New World Record for Winged Migration
September 11, 2007
The BBC News reports that a female bar-tailed godwit flew 11,500km (almost 7200 mi) nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand.  The journey took about a week.  Observers at Massey University used electronic tags to catalog the birds’ flight.     This distance is nearly double what ornithologists used to consider an “extremely long” flight.  This […]
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Birds

Dinosaurs Stretched, Shrunk and Twisted Into Birds
September 6, 2007
Size matters, thought paleontologists envisioning the evolution of birds from dinosaurs.  The old story was that dinosaurs shrunk as their arms were becoming wings.  That view has been challenged by a new fossil reported in Science.1  Alan H. Turner (American Museum of Natural History) and four others reported a “basal dromeosaurid” that was small long […]
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Mammals

Whale Sonar: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
September 5, 2007
Biosonar is a complex ability possessed by toothed whales and dolphins, bats and some birds.  It includes both the ability to produce signals and to process the echoes to locate prey.  How could such a system evolve?  Scientists at UC Berkeley proposed an answer.  The press release promised a developing story: Behind the sailor’s lore […]
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Birds

Birds Eat Dark Moths, Therefore God Does Not Exist
September 3, 2007
Michael Majerus watched birds eat peppered moths from his window for seven years (06/25/2004), then drew his conclusions.  In a presentation to a science conference in Uppsala, Sweden on August 23, he said that the peppered moth story proves evolution, which means there is no supernatural being to save us, there is no second coming, […]
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Mammals

Evolution Takes Credit
August 24, 2007
It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but evolution often just takes.  The following news stories show evolution taking credit for a variety of phenomena when it is not quite clear how it earned it. Big insects:  Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory surmised that insects were larger in the past because there […]
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Early Man

Fossil Gorilla Forces Hominid Ancestor Earlier
August 23, 2007
A set of gorilla teeth found in Ethiopia pushes the evolutionary story of a split between apes and humans back almost twice as far as previously thought.  Nature reported the fossil announcement that estimated the date of the teeth as 10.5-11 million years old.1  The prior estimate for a human-ape divergence was about 6 million. […]
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Amazing Facts

Crows Use Tools on Tools
August 21, 2007
Crows can use one tool on another to get food.  A report in Science Daily says they appear to use analogical reasoning, not just trial and error, to figure out how to manipulate objects.  They used a short stick to get a longer stick out of a toolbox in order to reach a snack too […]
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Biomimetics

Two Ways to Look at a Fin
August 21, 2007
Two science articles this month showed very different ways to look at a fish fin.  One looked for evolution; the other looked for design.  One tried to trace an evolutionary story with no practical application; the other tried to find ways to improve our lives.     The evolutionary story involved a fossil coelacanth.  Science […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Shark Chefs and Finger Food
August 15, 2007
A press release from University of Florida wins this week’s prize for trying to make dogmatism funny (or at least appealing to snackers): When the first four-legged animals sprouted fingers and toes, they took an ancient genetic recipe and simply extended the cooking time, say University of Florida scientists writing in Wednesday’s issue of the […]
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Human Body

Monkeys Prefer the Sound of Silence
August 5, 2007
Given a choice, chimpanzees choose silence over music.  The Random Samples page in Science1 mentioned experiments by scientists from MIT and Harvard where monkeys were given a choice of booths playing a flute lullaby, a Mozart concerto, techno-rock, and silence.  Between the musical booths, “The monkeys spent an average of about two-thirds of their time […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinism Seen in Action!
August 3, 2007
An example of Darwinian evolution in action was reported by EurekAlert.  This dramatic announcement called it a “rare example” of a “controversial theory of genetic conflict” in the reproduction of certain fish: The conflict has been likened to a “battle of the sexes” or an “arms race” at the molecular level between mothers and fathers.  […]
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Marine Biology

Deep Sea Vents Tantalize Evolutionists
August 1, 2007
A team of Chinese and American scientists pulled up fragments of deep-sea vents and analyzed their contents, reported Science Daily.  They said the creatures inhabiting these vents are the “most primitive life forms on Earth,” and so thought that the fragments might provide clues to the origin of life.  Timothy Kusky of Saint Louis University […]
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