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Today, the coelacanth is a fascinating deep-sea fish that lives off the coasts of eastern Africa and Indonesia and can reach up to 2m in length. They are "lobe-finned" fish, which means they have robust bones in their fins not too dissimilar to the bones in our own arms, and are thus considered to be more closely related to lungfish and tetrapods (the back-boned animals with arms and legs such as frogs, emus, and mice) than most other fishes.Over the past 410 million years, more than more than 175 species of coelacanths have been discovered across the globe. During the...

Kamala Harris. Donald Trump. Gish Gallop. All three are expected at Tuesday’s presidential debate, even if most of America is unfamiliar with one name in that lineup. GG, as I’ve now come to call it, is a shell game/debate tactic that takes its name from Duane Gish, a prominent figure in the creationist movement who deployed dubious arguments, selective factoids, and rapid-fire lies to overwhelm his opponents in public discussions about the theory of evolution. The disinformation technique, coined Gish Gallop in 1994 by the National Center for Science Education’s founding director Eugenie Scott, is essentially the art of burying...

New research reveals that discrepancies between the locations where fossils are found and the areas where early humans are thought to have resided could affect our comprehension of human evolutionary history.A significant portion of the early human fossil record comes from a few key locations in Africa, where ideal geological conditions have preserved a wealth of fossils that scientists use to piece together the story of human evolution. One notable area is the eastern branch of the East African Rift System, which includes important fossil sites like Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania.Yet, the eastern branch of the rift system only accounts...

A group of scientists, led by paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, an Emeritus Professor President of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at the Southern Methodist University Campus in Dallas, Texas, have made a significant discovery. The scientists found matching dinosaur footprints on two separate continents, South America and Africa. In Brazil and Cameroon, over 260 footprints were uncovered. These footprints show where dinosaurs once roamed freely on the two continents millions of years ago before South America and Africa drifted apart. Jacobs explained that the footprints were not only similar in age but also in their geological...

Scientists have revealed that graphite in the ancient Saglek-Hebron iron formations of Nunatsiavut, once thought to indicate the earliest life on Earth, likely has abiotic origins.Early Life on EarthThe isotopic composition of carbon in iron formations from the Saglek-Hebron Complex in Nunatsiavut (northern Labrador) has been seen as evidence of the earliest traces of life on Earth. But a new study by the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and University College London suggests otherwise.The study shows that the petrographic, geochemical, and spectroscopic features in the graphite (the crystalline form of carbon) found in the Saglek-Hebron chemical sedimentary rocks are in...

With 60 razor-sharp teeth and jaws so powerful they could crush a car, the King of the Dinosaurs would already have been a terrifying sight.But if that wasn't enough, the T. Rex may have been 70 per cent heavier than previously thought – weighing up to 15 tonnes – according to a study...The palaeontologists found that the largest known T. Rex fossils probably fall in the 99th percentile – representing the top 1 per cent of body size – but finding one would require excavating fossils for another 1,000 years...Meanwhile, a separate study suggests that the T. Rex may also...

This video delves into the intriguing tale of Andrew Sarkus Mongali Enus, the largest land predator ever unearthed. Its discovery, nearly a century past, during an expedition in Mongolia, unveiled a creature of formidable proportions. Initially pegged as a member of the Mesonychids, a diverse group of mammals spanning small to large sizes, further scrutiny four decades later revealed Andrew Sarkus's true kinship with the Uintatheres, colloquially dubbed "hell pigs." The enigmatic nature of Andrew Sarkus is compounded by its solitary status within the Andrew Sids group, making it a challenge to reconstruct its full anatomical profile. Clad in fur...

The ancient forest displayed traces of early plants, with some believed to have existed during the time of dinosaurs. The region's cartography commenced half a decade ago, dating back to 2019. Researchers have discovered the planet's most ancient forest within a deserted quarry near Cairo, New York. Embedded in rocks dating back 385 million years, these fossils preserve the petrified roots of numerous ancient trees. This discovery signifies a pivotal moment in Earth's timeline. As trees developed these roots, they played a crucial role in extracting carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, sequestering it and triggering a significant transformation in...

Does anyone remember the epic threads a few years ago about evolution? I forget the main poster but the subject would swell to a thousand or two in short order. In addition to being an interesting subject the science involved was all over the place. What I could follow. Most was over my head, but the passion was something to behold. I also enjoyed the 'rational' evolution folk countering the 'emotional' Christian side of the subject with a batch of desperate fakery. The Piltdown Man probably the most famous.

Monkeys in modern-day Thai forests create stone artifacts uncannily similar to those crafted by early humans — challenging the established narrative of human cultural evolution. A new study published on Friday in Science Advances suggests the possibility that a critical hallmark of human tool use happened by accident — potentially blurring the line between tool use by early humans and our primate relatives. - snip - In an abandoned oil palm plantation on a national park site, the monkeys would create nut-cracking ‘stations’ beneath the feral trees. There they break open the palm fruit’s oil-rich pit between hand-wielded hammer rocks...

The face of an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy who died more than 30,000 years ago has been reconstructed by scientists who used a skull initially found in the Teshik-Tash cave in Uzbekistan in 1938. The portrait is the first three-dimensional restoration of a Neanderthal skull fossil, which reveals the young boy had a small, turned-up nose that sunk into his face. The fossil is the first Neanderthal fossil discovered in Asia and the only complete Asian Neanderthal skull fossil preserved so far....

Around 120 million years ago, four-winged dinosaurs roughly the size of crows called Microraptors stalked the ancient woodlands of what is now China.While researchers have studied several Microraptor specimens, there's still a lot we don't know about these feathered bird-like creatures – including what and how they ate.Now an incredibly rare fossil has revealed the preserved final meal of one individual: and unexpectedly, it was a mammal...The first Microraptor fossil was found in Liaoning, China, in 2000. There are three known species, which lived in the early Cretacious period, and the fossil in question belongs to Microraptor zhaoianus...The Microraptors were...

We know that colliding two particles in empty space can sometimes cause additional particles to emerge. There are even theories that a strong enough electromagnetic field could create matter and antimatter out of nothing itself. Big Think reports, in early 2022, a group of researchers created strong enough electric fields in their laboratory to level the unique properties of a material known as graphene. With these fields, the researchers were able to enable the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. This proved that creating matter from nothing is indeed possible, a theory first proposed by Julian Schwinger,...

The fossilized skeleton of a T. rex relative that roamed the earth about 76 million years ago will be auctioned in New York this month, Sotheby’s announced Tuesday. The Gorgosaurus skeleton will highlight Sotheby’s natural history auction on July 28, the auction house said. The Gorgosaurus was an apex carnivore that lived in what is now the western United States and Canada during the late Cretaceous Period. It predated its relative the Tyrannosaurus rex by 10 million years. The specimen being sold was discovered in 2018 in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Montana, Sotheby’s said. It measures nearly 10...

The theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many essential realities that theories based on spontaneous chance do not.The scientific establishment is slowly beginning to allow scientists who believe in intelligent design to have a platform. Why? It may be because the theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many essential realities that theories based on spontaneous chance do not. Perhaps the simplest and best argument for intelligent design is to clearly state what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, as I did in my book, “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent...

A growing number of scientists seem finally ready to at least include intelligent design within the ‘range of views’ allowed to be heard.At first glance, the Potential and Limitations of Evolutionary Processes conference in Israel last week, which I attended, looked like any other scientific meeting on evolution, with talks by highly-credentialed scientists from institutions such as the Technical University of Munich, Cambridge, and the Weizmann Institute. But a closer look at the list of speakers shows that this one was different; it gave a platform to numerous notable proponents of intelligent design. The conference included chemistry Nobel prize winners...

A US Navy warship was shadowed by two car-size balls of light that were unaffected by anti-drone weapons, it is claimed. The USS Kearsarge is the latest vessel to have reportedly had a UFO encounter as the US military begins to open up about the mysterious phenomena. *snip* At least two objects are said to have lurked near the 40,500-ton amphibious assault ship for several nights while it was on a training exercise off the East Coast of the US. The phenomena — described by sources familiar with the encounter as odd and menacing “balls of light” — are said...

Today's Sermon explores the Magi and their desire to follow their science in paying homage to the 2 King of Kings - and how Faith has come to get a bad rap with the secularists. 14 min. YouTube VideoIs Science Opposed to Faith?

In a rather bizarre move, NASA has recruited a British priest to prepare the religious for the discovery of alien life as space agencies claim to be getting closer to discovering evidence that life exists outside of planet earth reports The Times. Reverend Dr. Andrew Davison, a priest and theology professor at the University of Cambridge, is among 24 theologians who are participating in a program sponsored by NASA at the space agency's Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) at Princeton University. The theologians are attempting to assess how major religions would react to news of alien life being found. The...

A summary of decades of research on a rather 'out-there' idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It's easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers like this one, from 2018, come along and leave us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin. A total of 33 names were listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology back in August 2018. The...