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Dinosaurs

Hadrosaur Skin Flick
December 3, 2007
The press is abuzz with the story of a mummified hadrosaur found in North Dakota with skin and fossilized soft parts; see PhysOrg, Science Daily, Associated Press and BBC News.  Since the fully-articulated, uncollapsed, mummified fossil named “Dakota” was discovered in 1999, though, it appears that the announcement is being made now primarily as publicity […]
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Uncategorized

Who Knows the Age of Grand Canyon?
November 30, 2007
“In spite of over a century of work on the Grand Canyon, there are still fundamental questions about the age of the canyon and the processes that have formed it.”  Thus begins a paper in the November GSA Bulletin of the Geological Society of America.1  To re-evaluate the date of Grand Canyon, a team dated […]
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Fossils

Early Platypus Stuns Evolutionists
November 27, 2007
With the possible exception of a monotreme tooth assumed to be 62 million years old, the oldest known platypus fossil was dated 15 million years old.  Now, a fossil from Australia reported in Science sets a new record: 112 million years old.1     “It’s really, really old for a monotreme,” Timothy Rowe of the […]
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Physics

Pangea Stuck at Square One
November 26, 2007
Students in their physical science classes learn all about Pangea, the supercontinent that broke up 200 million years ago and ended up with today’s familiar continents after millions of years of continental drift.  What they don’t often learn is how scientists come up with these ideas, and how they pull their hair out when observations […]
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Solar System

Give Thanks for Our Rare Moon
November 22, 2007
Our moon is a rare treat, says a press release from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based on findings from the Spitzer Space Telescope.  The telescope looked for indications of dust from collisions in other planetary disks thought to be the age of our solar system when our moon formed.  According to the leading theory, our moon […]
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Uncategorized

Mt. St. Helens Rebuilding Fast
November 21, 2007
Could Mt. St. Helens grow back to its pre-1980 size in just 180 years?  That’s what an article in the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune says.  The lava dome is growing fast, and so is a glacier inside the crater.  It is growing 3 feet per day.  The lava dome split the glacier because it was […]
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Early Man

Neanderthals Have Become Like Us
October 25, 2007
The change in attitude about Neanderthals is almost complete.  The formerly brutish missing links were pretty modern after all.  DNA sequencing of Neanderthal remains, along with new fossil discoveries, have made this subgroup of Homo sapiens for all intents and purposes the equivalents of us.  For example: Talk to me bro:  Neanderthals probably spoke languages […]
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Solar System

New Horizons at Jupiter
October 15, 2007
New Horizons, a spaceship bound for Pluto, took a good look at the Jupiter system on Feb 28, 2007.
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Fossils

Exceptional Preservation: Can It Last Hundreds of Millions of Years?
October 3, 2007
What can happen in 460 million years?  A lot, according to the standard geological timescale.  In this diagram of geological and biological evolution, accepted by nearly all geologists, all the continents came together 260 million years ago, broke up 200 million years ago, and broke into our familiar continents 100 million years ago (mya).  In […]
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Physics

More Impacts on Crater Count Dating
September 25, 2007
Planetary scientists have relied on crater counts to estimate the surface age of a planet or moon.  The more craters, the older the surface.  This method has recently come under closer scrutiny (see 10/20/2005) because of the phenomenon of secondary cratering.     A simplistic look at a crater-scarred planet or moon might lead one […]
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Cell Biology

Upsets: Assumptions About Genes, Atmospheres Challenged
September 24, 2007
It’s not fun when a whole superstructure of scientific theories and models is found to rest on a shaky foundation.  That’s just what may be happening in two very different fields: genetics and planetary science: Lateral pass to the opposing team:  Building evolutionary trees by comparing genomes was supposed to be simple.  Sure, geneticists knew […]
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Early Man

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 […]
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Physics

Saturn’s Iapetus Takes Cassini’s Spotlight
September 7, 2007
Scientists are eagerly poised for Cassini’s long-awaited ultra-close flyby of Iapetus on September 10.  The previous visit in 2005 was over 77,000 miles away; this flyby will skim the surface from less than 1,000 miles.  Moreover, it will see a portion of the moon only vaguely imaged by Voyager and Cassini before.  Jet Propulsion Laboratory, […]
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Astronomy

“We have no idea why these galaxies grew so large so soon”
August 11, 2007
Five full-sized galaxies have been detected at the edge of the visible universe, reported Science Now.  This continues a trend over the last few years where astronomers have been detecting old objects at young ages (e.g., 07/25/2007, 09/24/2006, 08/18/2006, 03/31/2006).   “The galaxies, which are forming stars very rapidly, are big for their age, meaning […]
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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 […]
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