VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Upper Limit Set on DNA Age

Forget Jurassic Park; DNA cannot last anywhere near 65 million years, researchers say.

Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies

Fossils are doing just fine, but the scientists who interpret them are having a rough week (or century).

Dinosaur Triggers and Other Fossil Foibles

Instant dinosaurs: just add mountains. Does this and other fossil news make sense?

Birdifying Dinosaurs

Birds and dinosaurs have oval eggs and big eyes. Does this necessarily mean they evolved from a common ancestor?

Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy

Another "feathered dinosaur" story has caused a flap and flurry of news reports. But are they really feathers, and do they help evolutionary theory?

"Darwin Fail" Entries Add Up

If nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution, the light sometimes is shining away from Darwin.

Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data

Observations don't always fit what evolutionists expect. Darwin's theory always wins anyway.

Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis

The scientific consensus has pretty much declared it a fact of natural history that birds evolved from dinosaurs. One evolutionary professor remains a gadfly, though. He contests the evidence on which the hypothesis is based, and also believes his maverick position is growing.

Paradigm Shift: Impact Didn't Kill Dinosaurs

A new study casts doubt on whether asteroid impacts led to extinctions. It's based on re-interpreting geological evidence used to identify impacts. This finding, if sustained, would undermine the theory that an impact killed off the dinosaurs and a later impact led to the extinction of many large mammals. Even more significant, an overturn of the impact hypothesis would illustrate that scientists are capable of going off on wrong tangents for decades.

Dinosaurs Display Death in Watery Grave

Many dinosaur fossils show the animals with neck arched backward. This appearance is so common, it has been dubbed the "dinosaur death pose." Various theories have been invoked to explain it: dessication and final death throes among the most common. A study with chickens shows the arching neck is the automatic response of immersion in water.

Mouse to Elephant? Just Add Time

How do you evolve a mouse into an elephant? Just add 24 million generations. But you can shrink it back down in just 100,000 generations. This and other eyebrow-raising stories have been told in the secular science media recently.

Science Grab Bag

Here's a random assortment of things floating around in the science news media – some fascinating, some informative, some disgusting. We’ll let the readers decide which is which. Since it’s Friday the 13th, a day to enjoy like any other day, we’ll give you a baker’s dozen to sample.

Titanosaur Bones Found in Antarctica

Strange as it seems, large sauropods of the Titanosaur variety have been found in Antarctica. This is the highest latitude sauropod ever found. It means that the large reptiles inhabited every continent; they walked the globe.

What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory?

Evolutionary biologists and geologists speak of events happening millions or billions of years ago as concrete facts. They are not observational facts, though; they are inferences from indirect evidence. Indirect evidence can often lead to different conclusions; in fact, some philosophers like Duhem and Quine argue for “under-determination of theory by data,” meaning that data can never converge to support just one theory. Some can demonstrate logically that there are an infinite number of theories that can explain a set of data. Evolutionary scientists counter that there are only one or a few that are reasonable (implying that theirs is among the limited set of reasonable ones). Recent discoveries that threaten to overturn past reasonable theories, though, cast doubt on their confidence.

Nature Does It Right

Scientists and engineers continue to find well-designed features in living things that are worth imitating.
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="7"]