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Geological Dates Adjust Catastrophically to Evolutionary Assumptions

September 19, 2007

Pick a date for the rise of a land mass: 3 million years or 30 million years. Either one will work, depending on the current evolutionary assumptions, if one is to follow the logic of an article on the Discovery Channel website. Here’s how it began: The geologic rise of the Ethiopian Plateau may have […]

Dumb Ideas

Early Reptile Had Modern Ears

September 18, 2007

Modern ears are nothing new; they go back 260 million years. That’s the gist of a paper in PLoS ONE that reported on a Russian reptile fossil.1 The research team was surprised to discover that the creature had impedance-matched ears, a novelty thought to have evolved 50 million years later. Somehow this innovation survived one […]

Dumb Ideas

Potatoes: Brain Food for Evolutionary Health

September 11, 2007

A claim that eating starchy foods, like potatoes, made men out of monkeys made it all the way to the BBC News. “Man’s ability to digest starchy foods like the potato may explain our success on the planet, genetic work suggests,” the subtitle read. Not only that, it claimed “these extra calories may have been […]

Darwin and Evolution

Are You a Glorified Ape?

September 9, 2007

Evolutionists cannot deny the large cognitive gaps between humans and the alleged nearest ancestors, the great apes.

Birds

Dinosaurs Stretched, Shrunk and Twisted Into Birds

September 6, 2007

Size matters, thought paleontologists envisioning the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. The old story was that dinosaurs shrunk as their arms were becoming wings. That view has been challenged by a new fossil reported in Science.1 Alan H. Turner (American Museum of Natural History) and four others reported a “basal dromeosaurid” that was small long […]

Fossils

Do Genes Reveal the Cambrian Explosion?

September 4, 2007

A Croatian geneticist believes he can find the Cambrian Explosion in the genes. Science Daily told about Tomislav Domazet-Loso from the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, whose team employed a “novel methodological approach in evolutionary studies” they called “genomic phylostratigraphy.” Looking for a “genetic trigger” for the Cambrian explosion, they hoped their method can “shed […]

Dumb Ideas

Messy Evidence Proves Humans Evolved

September 1, 2007

An article from Live Science seems to suggest that the way to do science these days is to believe things in spite of the evidence – at least when it comes to human evolution. In a juxtaposition of imponderables that might make a schizophrenic feel at home, Meredith Small asserted that evolution is a fact […]

Early Man

Tales of Two Footprints

August 27, 2007

Footprints in the sands of time have been found at two different locations. What tales do they tell? One is a footprint of a Roman soldier. EurekAlert described how the sandal print was uncovered at Hippos, or Susita, on a hill east of the Sea of Galilee. It hints that soldiers participated in […]

Early Man

Fossil Gorilla Forces Hominid Ancestor Earlier

August 23, 2007

A set of gorilla teeth found in Ethiopia pushes the evolutionary story of a split between apes and humans back almost twice as far as previously thought. Nature reported the fossil announcement that estimated the date of the teeth as 10.5-11 million years old.1 The prior estimate for a human-ape divergence was about 6 million. […]

Biomimetics

Two Ways to Look at a Fin

August 21, 2007

Two science articles this month showed very different ways to look at a fish fin. One looked for evolution; the other looked for design. One tried to trace an evolutionary story with no practical application; the other tried to find ways to improve our lives. The evolutionary story involved a fossil coelacanth. Science […]

Dinosaurs

Largest Dinosaur Mass Grave in Switzerland Found

August 15, 2007

As many as 100 plateosaurs may be buried in a mass grave in Switzerland, reported the Reuters news service. “The finds show that an area known for Plateosaurus finds for decades may be much larger than originally thought” – as much as a mile in width in the town of Frick, near the German border. […]

Early Man

Homo habilis Contemporary with Homo erectus

August 9, 2007

Homo habilis couldn’t have been the ancestor of Homo erectus, because they lived side by side. This has been all over the news since it was announced in Nature yesterday: see the Times UK, PhysOrg, the BBC News, Reuters Africa, National Geographic, and MSNBC News, which says the new discovery paints a “messy” view of […]

Early Man

Romanian Neanderthal May Have Interbred With Modern Humans

August 2, 2007

A report in National Geographic says that a skull found in a Romanian cave is shaking up ideas about Neanderthal Man and its relationship to modern humans. The mostly modern skull shows a feature that was characteristic of Neanderthals: “The otherwise human skull has a groove at the base of the back of the skull, […]

Fossils

Trilobite Tree Is Upside Down

July 28, 2007

Darwin predicted that life would become more diverse over time, like the branches on a tree. The pattern of trilobites in the fossil record is just the opposite: more diversity appears in the lower layers, and less diversity in the upper layers. Surprisingly, evolutionary paleontologists are turning this into evidence for Darwin’s theory. […]

Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Sex and Other Tales

July 24, 2007

How much do we really know about dinosaurs? How much can be inferred from their bones? Two recent stories illustrate conflicting themes: much of what we thought we knew was wrong, but that doesn’t stop evolutionary paleontologists from speaking with confidence. Walking with dino ancestors: Paleontologists used to think that the alleged precursors of dinosaurs […]

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