Fossils – Page 58

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Conjuring Up Evolutionary Implications from Current Data

August 11, 2010

What does observable reality imply about unobservable reality? Some scientists say, a lot. But is unobservable reality really real? Or is it an oxymoron? A couple of recent articles in the science media show scientists observing things in the present, then saying they have “huge implications” for things no scientist ever observed. In […]

Cell Biology

Explosion of the Blob

August 5, 2010

Some scientists are looking into the folds of a sponge for clues about the Cambrian Explosion – the sudden emergence of all the major body plans in the geological blink of an eye. What they are finding is more complexity than a first glance at the simple creatures would expect. A draft genome […]

Birds

Getting Animals from Here to There

July 30, 2010

The world is a big place, and most animals are small. Yet many animals are found far from where their presumed ancestors lived. Most birds, naturally, can fly long distances, and some sea creatures can cross the oceans with the help of currents. That cannot explain all the cases, however. Here are some attempts by […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution of Segmentation Leads to Playing God

July 28, 2010

Most animals come in segments – body plans that are divided into more-or-less similar parts. Arthropods, worms and vertebrates are examples (including humans, with their vertebral segments and rough division into head, thorax and abdomen). Where did the idea of segmentation come from? Some French evolutionists think it just appeared by chance and changed the […]

Fossils

Scratching Heads With Imaginary Stars

July 21, 2010

It was lurking out there, astronomers said. Our sun’s evil companion, invisible, dark, like a stealthy general of an enemy force, wandered silently in hiding, waiting for the next opportunity to order its agents of death into combat. Its name was Nemesis. Every 27 million years, using its gravity, it sent comets from the Oort […]

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. […]

Darwin and Evolution

Do New Fossils Soften the Cambrian Explosion?

July 5, 2010

Look at the picture of fossils in an article on PhysOrg. The discoverers claim these fossils from Gabon are 2.1 billion years old, and provide evidence that multicellular organisms began evolving long before the Cambrian explosion. “Until now, it has been assumed that organized multicellular life appeared around 0.6 billion years ago and that before […]

Early Man

Lucy Gets a Date with Big Man

June 22, 2010

Another specimen of Australopithecus afarensis has been announced from Ethiopia. This one supposedly preceded Lucy by 400,000 years, and according to its discoverers, belonged to a group of primates that shows they “were almost as proficient as we are walking on two legs, and that the elongation of our legs came earlier in our evolution […]

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. […]

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 […]

Fossils

More Pow in the Cambrian Explosion

May 11, 2010

Scientists have found more fossil evidence for sudden emergence of animal body plans in the Cambrian strata. Two papers in Geology discuss evidence on opposite sides of the world. One team found bryozoans in Mexico 8 million years older than the record-holders in China,1 and another scientist found diverse echinoderms in Spain dating from the […]

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 […]

Early Man

Humans and Neanderthals Are One

May 8, 2010

If Neanderthals bred with modern humans, they are one and the same species. That must be the case according to the most widely-accepted definition of a species: those who can breed and produce fertile offspring. The news media are abuzz with Science magazine’s cover story this week, “The Neanderthal Genome.”1 Most anthropologists are now accepting […]

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 […]

Darwin and Evolution

What Can Fossil Leaf Measurements Tell About Evolution?

April 21, 2010

Flowering plants burst on the scene in the fossil record 140 million years ago in the geologic timescale, creating an “abominable mystery” for Charles Darwin. What can be learned by measuring the stems and leaves of fossil specimens? Dana Royer and colleagues from Wesleyan University in Connecticut embarked on a project to measure […]

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