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Dinosaurs

This Badger Ate Dinosaurs for Breakfast
January 12, 2005
BBC News claims a new fossil discovery published in Nature,1 a large badger-like carnivorous mammal, ate dinosaurs for lunch.  But then again, who knows what time of day the Cretaceous restaurants were open?     The fossil, another in a series of spectacular finds from the Liaoning Province in China, is creating a sensation, because […]
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Early Man

Anthropologist Claims Humans, Neanderthals, Australopithecines All Variations on One Species
January 1, 2005
According to a news story in the UK News Telegraph, all fossil hominids, including modern humans, Australopithecines, Neanderthals and the recent Indonesian “hobbit man,” belong to the same species: Homo sapiens.  Reporter Robert Matthews wrote about Maciej Henneberg (U of Adelaide) and his argument, based on skull sizes and body weights for 200 fossil specimens, […]
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Early Man

Human Evolution Falsified
December 30, 2004
The title of this entry comes from the data, not from the claims being made about it.  The cover story in Cell1 this week has set off a flurry of startling headlines: EurekAlert pronounces, “Evidence that human brain evolution was a special event” and “University of Chicago researchers discovered that humans are a ‘privileged’ evolutionary […]
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Dumb Ideas

Paleoanthropologists Fight Tooth and Nail
December 21, 2004
Ann Gibbons, reporter for Science, seems to enjoy watching the fights about human ancestry.  At Science Now, she began a news item about an alleged fossil human ancestor with a joke: How many paleoanthropologists does it take to locate a molar on the correct side of a fossil jawbone?  The short answer to this joke, […]
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Dinosaurs

Cretaceous Temperature Estimates Point Out Flaws in Climate Models
December 15, 2004
Nature1 this week described evidence for high temperatures in the Arctic during the Cretaceous that it termed “astounding.”  Based on work by Jenkins et al. that Arctic waters were 15°C, as warm as modern coastal waters off France and Maryland. For a region blanketed in darkness for half of the year, the Arctic Ocean was […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Introducing the Stretch & Squish Theory of Evolution
December 14, 2004
How do you squish an arm into a wing, or stretch a fin into a leg? This sounds like the silly putty theory of evolution.
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Irresponsibility
December 7, 2004
Evolutionists at the University of Minnesota have developed a theory for the evolution of impulsive behavior, reports EurekAlert.  They say that because our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, they had to grab what they could without thought of future reward or punishment: When psychologists study kids who are good at waiting for a reward, they find those […]
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Early Man

Archaeology Is Hindered by Evolutionary Assumptions
December 1, 2004
Why was a complex village uncovered in Uruguay called “unexpected”?  Peter W. Stahl (anthropology, Binghamtom U.) asks the question in the Dec. 2 issue of Nature:1 Evidence of unexpected complexity in an ancient community in Uruguay is a further blow to the conventional view of prehistoric development in marginal areas of lowland South America.   […]
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Early Man

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Blurs
December 1, 2004
How was National Geographic able to publish an artist’s reconstruction of Homo floriensis (aka Hobbit Man) the same day Nature published the find? (See 10/27/2004 headline).  Martin Kemp (U. of Oxford, UK) explains in the Dec. 2 issue1 how Peter Schouten, an artist, got the gig: Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum …. […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs Survived Cold Arctic
October 27, 2004
Dinosaurs, ferns and trees grew in Canada’s far north provinces, according to EurekAlert report from McGill University.  “You wouldn’t expect it, yet dinosaurs and a great variety of plants lived in the High Arctic 240 to 65 million years ago,” said Hans Larsson, leader of research over two years.  Who wouldn’t expect it?  Evolutionists.
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Dumb Ideas

Middle Earth in Indonesia?  Fossil “Hobbits” Smash Evolutionary Ring
October 27, 2004
Here we go again: another alleged human ancestor fossil that shakes up the evolutionary family tree.  No sooner had Nature1 announced a little 1-meter tall fossil female “hominin” that the discoverers classified as Homo erectus, that the science news media like MSNBC and the BBC flew into action reporting it as “fossil hobbits”  They seem […]
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Fossils

Was Darwin Wrong?
October 24, 2004
One would think National Geographic wants to know, judging from the cover of the November 2004 issue: “Was Darwin Wrong?”  A reader might think the magazine editors, in light of the controversy about evolution sweeping the country, thought it would be timely to engage in a scientific debate about Darwin’s 19th-century theory.  The reader might […]
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Fossils

How a Darwinist Explains “Living Fossils”
October 13, 2004
Darwinism is a flexible concept that must embrace a wide variety of observations, from apparently fast-evolving plants (see 10/12/2004 item on maize) to organisms that seem to remain unevolved for eons.2  Darwin himself saw this flexibility as a strength for his unifying concept of common descent; others criticized it as rationalization (i.e., a concept that […]
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Cell Biology

News Nuggets
October 12, 2004
Here’s a collection of news items that deserve quick notice: Mars Rumbles:  Mars still has minor earthquakes, says Space.com, That’s without plate tectonics, “But scientists don’t know exactly how Mars is constructed.”  The Mars Exploration Rovers, meanwhile, awaking from a winter’s nap, are still gathering science data long past their expected lifetime.  Evidence for past […]
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Birds

Little Tyrannosaur with “Proto-Feathers” Found
October 6, 2004
National Geographic News wasted no time; a day before a report of another Chinese dinosaur with feathery-like structures was published in Nature,1 they already had color artwork on their news page, trumpeting the title, “T. Rex Cousin Had Feathers.”  Yet Nature itself seemed ho-hum about the announcement.  It was neither the cover story, nor mentioned […]
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