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Radiometric backflip: Bird footprints overturn ‘dating certainty’ by Jonathan O'Brien Using well-known radioisotope technology, scientists dated the Santo Domingo rock formation in Argentina at 212 million years old. This happened to agree well with a nearby geologic formation that was also radiometrically dated.1 The radiometric date of the Santo Domingo formation also agreed with the dating based on fossil wood found entombed in the rock. This wood came from an extinct species of tree conventionally believed to have existed around 200 million years ago. Well-preserved and abundant tracks were also found in the rock, similar in appearance to bird tracks....

Yet another old-earther accuses a creationist of believing in evolution by Nick Sabato Published: 12 April 2016 (GMT+10) On a 28 March 2016 blog post, Professor Ken Keathley made the allegation that Ken Ham now embraces evolution. He bases this unfounded assertion on a recent article where Ham discusses how the diversity of species present today can be traced back to their respective “kinds” represented on the Ark. For Keathley, it is “big news” that a prominent creationist “has embraced macro-evolution.” However, as will be seen, creationists in general embraced speciation for decades; it is not just a property of...

An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms, said research leader Dr Anton Wallner from The Australian National University (ANU). "We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years," said Dr Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research...

In what has been described as a breakthrough, Vietnamese and Russian archaeologists have found valuable artifacts in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai that they say belonged to ancient humans around 800,000 years ago. The traces of homo erectus or "upright man," including fossils and more than 200 stone tools, were discovered at 12 locations around An Khe Town, according to the findings announced by the scientists on Friday. It was "the biggest and most important" archeological discovery not only for Vietnam but Asia, Dr. Nguyen Giang Hai, chief of Vietnam's Institute of Archeology, told Tuoi Tre newspaper. The...

Jaws may have terrified you at the cinema, but the iconic great white would have been dwarfed by Carcharocles megalodon, the largest shark in the history of the planet. The giant creatures lived between 23 million and 2.6 million years ago and scientists are divided over how and why the species perished. Now, details of fossils from the huge shark that lived alongside the dinosaurs have been studied for the first time in an attempt to solve this mystery.

Two cubs were found in Russia's Sakha Republic last August in a near-perfect state thanks to the deep-freeze conditions where they lay. Scientists are attempting to clone extinct Ice Age lion cubs by finding DNA in the remains of the creatures. Researchers hope to find living tissues containing DNA in the remains, which will allow them to recreate the now extinct Ice Age cave lion. The 12,000-year-old cave lion cubs were found frozen in ice last year- so well preserved their whiskers are still bristling. The pair of prehistoric predators, named Uyan and Dina, are the most unspoilt examples of...

An ancient species of pint-sized humans discovered in the tropics of Indonesia may have met their demise earlier than once believed, according to an international team of scientists who reinvestigated the original finding. Published in the journal Nature this week, the group challenges reports that these inhabitants of remote Flores island co-existed with modern humans for tens of thousands of years. They found that the youngest age for Homo floresiensis, dubbed the 'Hobbit', is around 50,000 years ago not between 13,000 and 11,000 years as initially claimed. Led by Indonesian scientists and involving researchers from Griffith University's Research Centre of...

The hunters searching for mammoth tusks were drawn to the steep riverbank by a deposit of ancient bones. To their astonishment, they discovered an Ice Age puppy’s snout peeking out from the permafrost. Five years later, a pair of puppies perfectly preserved in Russia’s far northeast region of Yakutia and dating back 12,460 years has mobilised scientists across the world. “To find a carnivorous mammal intact with skin, fur and internal organs - this has never happened before in history,” said Sergei Fyodorov, head of exhibitions at the Mammoth Museum of the North-Eastern Federal University in the regional capital of...

Tyrannosaur Ancestral Tree Remains Limbless by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Since Darwin's time, the lack of fossil evidence for vertical evolution has always been a problem for secular scientists. Now a recent paper published online in Scientific Reports attempts to map out the ancestry of tyrannosaurs.1 The two authors, Stephen Brusatte and Thomas Carr, hoped that the surge in new discoveries of tyrannosaurs would help in their analysis, noting that the "origins, phylogeny, and evolution of tyrannosaurids were long mysterious."1 However, their results produced no answers…only more questions. In their report, they conclude, "Tyrannosauroids are the subject of more research...

For decades, scientists have estimated that the Siberian unicorn - a long-extinct species of mammal that looked more like a rhino than a horse - died out some 350,000 years ago, but a beautifully preserved skull found in Kazakhstan has completely overturned that assumption. Turns out, these incredible creatures were still around as recently as 29,000 years ago. Before we talk about the latest discovery, yes, there was a very real 'unicorn' that roamed Earth tens of thousands of years ago, but it was nothing like the one found in your favourite children’s book. (Sorry - it’s a bummer for...

One whole endogenous retrovirus genome -- and bits of 17 others -- were spotted in a study of 2,500 human genomes... Nineteen new pieces of DNA -- left by viruses that first infected our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago -- have just been found, lurking between our own genes. And one stretch of newfound DNA, found in about 50 of the 2,500 people studied, contains an intact, full genetic recipe for an entire virus, say the scientists who published their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Whether or not it can replicate, or...

For about 60 million years during the Eocene epoch, the Indian subcontinent was a huge island. Having broken off from the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, the Indian Tectonic Plate drifted toward Eurasia. During that gradual voyage, the subcontinent saw a blossoming of exceptional wildlife, and when the trove of unique biodiversity finally made contact with bigger Eurasia, the exchange of animals and plants between these areas laid the foundations for countless modern species. "Today, mainland Asia and India have all this unique biodiversity -- but did the mainland Asian biodiversity come from India, or did the Indian biodiversity come from...

...following some remarkable technical developments in that time, including next generation sequencing, ancient DNA research is beginning to come of age... Here are three big issues which I think geneticists are making headway on, following decades of stalled progress by fossil specialists. 1. There's been a shift from merely documenting the occurrence of interbreeding between modern humans and archaic groups, like the Neanderthals and Denisovans, to a focus on the circumstances surrounding it and its consequences for living people... Around 2 per cent of the genome of non-African people was inherited from Neanderthals, with slightly more DNA in Indigenous Oceanic...

The late Early Pleistocene site near Untermassfeld, in Germany, is now well known for a rich array of fauna dating back to about 1.07 million years ago, including simple 'Mode 1' (or Oldowan-type) stone tools evidencing early human occupation. Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple 'Mode 1' stone tools. The butchered assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying of...

March 25th is Good Friday *and* the Feast of the Annunciation. Talk about a powerful moment for reflection... We couldn't help but notice that the Feast of the Annunciation fell on Good Friday (of all days!) and wanted to share Mike's thoughts on the coincidence... if you believe in such things as coincidence. This week is the holiest week of the year. Through the Passion, suffering, death and resurrection of Our Blessed Lord, the curse of Adam is undone. Our Lord provides the path to salvation through the cross so that we are no longer permanent exiles from Paradise. This...

More than 65 million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis and an explosion of debris that blanketed the Earth in layers of dust and sediment. Now analysis of commercial oil drilling data—denied to the academic community until recently—offers the first detailed look at how the Chicxulub impact reshaped the Gulf of Mexico. Figuring out what happened after these types of impacts gives researchers a better idea of how they redistribute geological material around the world. It also gives scientists an idea of what to expect if another such impact were to occur...

Evolutionary Tyranny Still Casts Cloud Over Science by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recent scientific paper, published in the high-profile journal PLOS ONE, made three separate references to the amazing design of the human hand…and rightly attributed them to the Creator.1 Evolutionists cried foul and raised such an uproar that the journal retracted the paper. Evolutionary scientists often claim they are objective in their work as researchers and educators. They also claim that creationist research isn't valid because creationists don't publish in secular journals. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that evolutionists are seldom objective...

Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat for the first time, and life was no picnic 1.8 million years ago. Our human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, had access to food, water and shady shelter at a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. They even had lots of stone tools with sharp edges, said Gail M. Ashley, a professor in the Rutgers Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences. But "it was tough living," she said. "It was a very stressful life because they were in continual competition...

[I posted this under science and food. Why? Because it's a story about genetically engineering a chicken so it's legs will grow like a dinosaurs, from which it evolved. But think about it. Instead of drumsticks you can eat dino-legs! And what will they taste like? Chicken, of course! Yummy!Dinosaur-like lower leg created on bird through molecular experimentAny one that has eaten roasted chicken can account for the presence in the drumstick (lower leg) of a long, spine-like bone. This is actually the fibula, one of the two long bones of the lower leg (the outer one). In dinosaurs, which...

A multi-disciplinary team of scientists have discovered the skull of a weird, unique extinct human and who was found in an underground cave Homo naledi fragments of skull and jaw ======================================================================================================= Scientists have discovered a skull belonging to a previously unknown species of human from three million years ago. The research team made up of paleoanthropologists stumbled across the remains in an underground cave and have now put together a skeleton which stands at 4ft 9 tall and is described as "a really, really strange creature." Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his co-horts stumbled...