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Fossils

Fossil Water Lily Matches Modern
May 19, 2004
Three Cornell botanists found fossil water lilies from the early Cretaceous that look nearly identical to modern ones, except that they are smaller.  The exquisitely-detailed fossils were preserved in a New Jersey clay pit by a process of coalification.  Water lilies (family Nymphaeaceae) are presumed by evolutionists to be among the earliest flowering plants (angiosperms).  […]
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Dinosaurs

New T. Rex Found; Best-Ever Skull Unveiled
May 14, 2004
National Geographic News has reported the excavation of a possibly complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton at a “secret location,” a private ranch, in Montana.  The curious can monitor the interactive dig at Unearthing T. Rex.     The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh has finally unveiled Samson, the best preserved skull of a Tyrannosaurus […]
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Fossils

Another Impact Theory for Permian Extinction Proposed
May 13, 2004
Richard Kerr was very cautious in his announcement in Science1 about a new claim about an asteroid impact near Australia causing the Permian Extinction.  He went to lengths to point out that the evidence is not clear, and that many other scientists disagree.  After describing the “proposed” impact site, he cautioned: Not so fast, say […]
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Birds

Fossil Hummingbird, Arthropod Look Modern
May 7, 2004
Science announced that a rare hummingbird fossil has been found in Germany and, though assumed to be 30 million years old, is indistinguishable from living New-World hummingbirds.  This upsets the standard theory that hummingbirds evolved in the New World only.  Writing in the May 7 issue,1 discoverer Gerald Mayr said, I report on tiny skeletons […]
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Dinosaurs

Feathered Dinosaur Exhibit Raises Doubts
May 6, 2004
Can you trust those fossils on display in your local museum, the ones showing “Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight”?  No less than the respected journal Nature1 is concerned they may have been gathered and sold illegally, and are no more trustworthy than the 1999 Archaeoraptor hoax that embarrassed National Geographic magazine.     […]
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Dumb Ideas

Neanderthals Matured Faster
April 29, 2004
The news media are all echoing a story out of Nature April 291 that Neanderthals matured by age 15, as indicated by their teeth.  A News and Views article in the same issue by Jay Kelley2 begins, It is nearly 150 years since the existence of Neanderthals was first recognized, but debate about their relationship […]
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Early Man

Another Human Distinctive: Lying
April 26, 2004
Here’s another evolutionary conundrum: animals usually don’t tell lies.  Why is lying such a well-documented human trait, but rare in the animal kingdom?  Animals signal their own and their enemies in many complex ways.  It would seem that lying would have evolved as a useful strategy many times in the animal kingdom, yet apparently it […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Extinction Theory #481b
April 22, 2004
Let’s try another one.  Temperature imbalances after the asteroid impact 65 million years ago caused cooler global temperatures.  This caused more eggs to hatch male, since in reptiles, egg temperatures can influence the sex of the hatchlings.  So a shortage of females gradually led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.     Why, then, didn’t […]
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Politics and Ethics

Eugenics Documentary Opens at Holocaust Museum
April 22, 2004
Michael Ollove at the Baltimore Sun reports on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.  The exhibit shows a 1937 Nazi propaganda film that invokes the law of natural selection as support for weeding out the unfit.  Ollove writes, The narrator declares that “we humans have sinned […]
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Fossils

Slowing Down the Cambrian Explosion
April 14, 2004
“Although the cause of the Cambrian radiation is unknown,” states a story in Science Now, maybe it wasn’t as rapid as previously thought.  Bruce Lieberman (U. of Kansas) is toying with the idea that trilobites, those icons of the Cambrian era, radiated into various ecological niches 65 million years earlier than the ~520 million year […]
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Dinosaurs

How Could Polar Dinosaurs Survive Freezing, Darkness?
March 29, 2004
National Geographic News has a report about a new exhibit of dinosaur fossils that have been found in the northern and southern polar regions.  These unusual creatures had to survive not only the cold, but also, due to the effects of orbital mechanics, six months of darkness each year.  Intrepid explorers in south Australia, northern […]
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Early Man

Neanderthals Not Our Cousins, Expert Claims
March 16, 2004
The news media are reporting claims that Neanderthals and modern humans never interbred, based on work from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  Both EurekAlert and Nature Science Update repeat the claim that the institute’s study of DNA and bones from four Neanderthals and five modern humans from scattered locations rules out any interbreeding. […]
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Geology

Rethinking the Geological Layers
March 5, 2004
One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.”  This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life.  Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]
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Early Man

The Paleoanthropologist Mantra: “We Need More Fossils!”
March 5, 2004
Everyone join in and chant “the mantra of all paleontologists: We need more fossils!”  If you are a seeker of bones that might give clues of human ancestry, repeating this phrase might relieve stress.     In quotes above is the concluding line of an editorial by David R. Begun in the March 5 issue […]
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Bible and Theology

Evolution of Language Debated
February 27, 2004
The Feb. 27 issue of Science features the topic of the evolution of language.1  The thousands of words in 10 articles might be summarized by the title of a book review by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: “Many Perspectives, No Consensus.”2 Since there are many perspectives and no consensus, language evolution is one of the subjects Darwinists love.  […]
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