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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

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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Darwin and Evolution

Divining Dino Dining
December 21, 2010
Some of those big, fierce-looking dinosaurs—cousins to T. rex—could have been vegetarians.  That’s a paradigm-shaking announcement being made by PhysOrg, Science Daily, and Live Science: “Meat-Eating Dinosaurs Not So Carnivorous After All.”  The revision is based on information from the Field Museum of Chicago.     A similar article on PhysOrg laments that one of […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Mammals Partied When Dinosaurs Left
November 29, 2010
A research team headed by a biology professor at the University of New Mexico are claiming that mammals had a field day when the dinosaurs went extinct.  They got bigger and more diverse, filling in the ecological wasteland left by the missing giant reptiles.  Their analysis was published in Science.1     In addition, they […]
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Dinosaurs

Kinder, Gentler Dinosaurs Envisioned
October 6, 2010
See if this statement by Tim Rowe [U of Texas at Austin] meets your mental picture of dinosaurs after a lifetime of movies: “We used to think of dinosaurs as fierce creatures that outcompeted everyone else,” he said.  “Now we’re starting to see that’s not really the case.  They were humbler, more opportunistic creatures.  They […]
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Birds

Dino-Bird Link Confused by New Fossil
September 9, 2010
A “bizarre” new dinosaur fossil found in Spain with a hump on its back that resembles a fin also has quill knobs on its arms, interpreted as attachment points for feathers.  For this reason, the BBC News announced that it “may” yield clues to the origin of birds.”  It has been named Concavenator corcovatus and […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Graveyards and Arctic Tortoises: Who’s Got the Context?
August 24, 2010
Science articles often go beyond the data.  A jumble of bones found on an island is boring; people want a story of what they were, and how they got that way.  Many scientists and reporters are only happy to fulfill that curiosity.  But are the stories they tell, usually presented as fact, the only way […]
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Birds

Revising Dinosaurs
July 14, 2010
Reconstructing a lost world from fossils is an inexact science.  The realization that two species of dinosaur were different growth stages of the same species is just one example of the difficulty of drawing conclusions about past ecological conditions.  It raises additional questions about the mental visions we have of the world of dinosaurs.   […]
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Birds

Fossils Without Evolution
June 18, 2010
New fossils continue to turn up around the world.  Many of them have an amazing characteristic in common: they look almost exactly like their living counterparts, despite being millions of years old, according to the evolutionary timescale.  It’s interesting sometimes to hear how the evolutionists explain the remarkable lack of evolution in all that time. […]
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Darwin and Evolution

How Science Is Done: Upsetting Applecarts
May 19, 2010
Hardly a week goes by without some scientific finding upsetting an applecart – a long-held belief.  Often, those beliefs are scientific theories taught in textbooks by science professors.  Defenders of science say that this is the way science works.  It’s a self-correcting process, they argue; it’s to be expected that new data will lead to […]
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Birds

Archaeopteryx Fossil Retains Original Soft-Tissue Material
May 10, 2010
We are usually told that fossils involve the complete replacement of original living material by rock, except in rare cases (such as amber), because organic material is quickly destroyed.  One of the most famous rock fossils is Archaeopteryx, the bird that has often been claimed to be a missing link from dinosaurs.  An international team […]
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Birds

Dino-Feather Story Gets Fluffier
May 1, 2010
Xing Xu is at it again, claiming that dinosaur feathers are found everywhere – in China, at least, where the bulk of “feathered dinosaur” claims keep turning up in farmyards.  The latest claim is that “Feather structures in maturing dinosaurs changed as they grew.”  This story is accompanied by artwork showing the critters looking as […]
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