Paleo – Page 82

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More Soft Tissue Found in Old Fossils

March 23, 2011

A reptile skin fossilized in rock said to be 50 million years old has been found. According to Science Daily, scientists at the University of Manchester reported the discovery of amide molecules in “fossilized soft tissue of a beautifully-preserved reptile.” The original paper, accessible to the public, was published in the Proceedings of the Royal […]

Fossils

Mummified Trees in the Arctic: Are They Millions of Years Old?

March 17, 2011

Arctic wood in a “polar desert” has been discovered that is “so well preserved that the wood can still burn, and even the most delicate tree structures, such as leaves, are present” reported PhysOrg. Joel Barker (Ohio State) remarked, “The dead trees look just like the dried-out dead wood lying outside now.” How old are […]

Darwin and Evolution

Assessing Evolutionary Explanations

March 11, 2011

No matter the biological discovery, evolutionists are ready with their explanations. The explanations, however, are often riddled with puzzles, surprises, and seemingly arbitrary appeals to chance. Do such explanations really provide more understanding than those of creationists, who explain that living things were designed for a purpose? Shrimp deal: “Many deep-sea species have close relatives […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolution by Loss

March 10, 2011

Evolutionists have added a counter-intuitive notion to their explanatory toolkit. It surfaced this week in Nature,1 then reverberated around the media: our ancestors became human when they lost genetic information from ape-like ancestors. New Scientist exemplified the new story line: “Key to humanity is in missing DNA.” Reporter Andy Coghlan explained the central […]

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 […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Turn Misses into Wins

February 25, 2011

Evolutionists have evolved a skill by design – the ability to turn falsification into confirmation. It’s a kind of philosophical judo, or parry, that can turn the energy of a criticism into a win for Darwin. Convergent turnarounds: A good example of an evolutionary parry can be seen in a post on Science Daily entitled, […]

Darwin and Evolution

New Cambrian Fossil: Missing Link?

February 23, 2011

A weird animal from Chinese Cambrian strata looks like a worm with legs, the whole body studded with spines. Was it on the way to becoming an arthropod? The authors think so, but other members of its group were already known from the Cambrian fossil record. The “walking cactus” with ten pairs of […]

Darwin and Evolution

New Ediacaran Fossils: Do They Ignite the Cambrian Explosion?

February 17, 2011

Well-preserved fossils of seaweed-like colonies have been reported from China. They are dated by the scientists at 600 million years old, from the Ediacaran period. Can these be missing links, lighting the fuse of biodiversity that culminated in the Cambrian explosion? PhysOrg summarized the findings published in Nature.1 “In addition to perhaps ancient […]

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 […]

Darwin and Evolution

Shrinking Brains Prove Human Evolution

February 6, 2011

Ever since Darwin, brain size has been the measure of human nature (e.g., 03/27/2007, 05/27/2009). Except for some anomalies with Neanderthal and Cro-magnon skull sizes, the iconic march of human evolution showed growing upright posture accompanied by increasing brain size (example on Daily Mail), and brain size was used to discriminate between races on the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Darwin and Evolution

Lice and Licentiousness in Paleoanthropology

January 8, 2011

A paleoanthropologist believes our ancestors ran nudist colonies for 830,000 years before inventing clothes, and can prove it from lice genes. The story is on Science Daily. By comparing head lice and clothes lice genomes, David Reed at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida came up with a […]

Cell Biology

Astrobiologists Explain Cambrian Explosion Using Invisible Data

January 7, 2011

According to PhysOrg and Astrobio.net, the skeletons to the Cambrian Explosion1 are hidden in the Precambrian closet, out of sight, even though the closet is open for inspection. We mustn’t be fooled into thinking there was a Creation event, because evolution was doing its work in secret, like magic: The first instance of biomineralization – […]

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