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Read these stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. Wall Street Journal: “Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions” 2. ScienceNOW: “Our Ancestors Were No Swingers” 3. National Geographic News: “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” 4. LiveScience: “Three Subgroups of Neanderthals Identified” 5. BBC News: “Stem Cells ‘Can Treat Diabetes’” (adult stem cells, that is...) 6. New Scientist: “Praying to God Is Like Talking to a Friend” And much much more at...

It's hard enough to find fossils of hard things like dinosaur bones. Now scientists have found evidence of 95 million-year-old octopuses, among the rarest and unlikeliest of fossils, complete with ink and suckers. The body of an octopus is composed almost entirely of muscle and skin. When an octopus dies, it quickly decays and liquefies into a slimy blob. After just a few days there will be nothing left at all. And that assumes that the fresh carcass is not consumed almost immediately by scavengers. The result is that preservation of an octopus as a fossil is about as unlikely...

First...How can distant starlight reach us in just 6,000 years? which Dr Jonathan Sarfati answers. Second, Paul N. of the UK asked why we don t find humans and dinosaur fossils together, which Dr David Catchpoole explains...

A giant head and gill-covered body make this newly reconstructed creature (pictured) "one of most bizarre fossil creatures that there is," one scientist said. The 505-million-year-old critter was first identified in 1912 from fossil pieces. Over the years, bits of it showed up in museum collections mislabeled as jellyfish, sea cucumbers, and various other creatures. But expeditions in the 1990s began to uncover more complete specimens, which suggested the animal, dubbed Hurdia Victoria, was much more unique than previously thought. Now, a well-preserved specimen found in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and...

Rock Layers Folded, Not Fractured Flood Evidence Number Six by Andrew A. Snelling March 15, 2009 How could a series of sedimentary layers fold without fracturing? The only way is for all the sedimentary layers to be laid down in rapid succession and then be folded while still soft and pliable. If the global Flood, as described in Genesis 7–8, really occurred, what evidence would we expect to find? Wouldn’t we expect to find rock layers all over the earth that are filled with billions of dead animals and plants that were rapidly buried and fossilized in sand, mud, and...

No Weaknesses in the Theory of Evolution? by Frank Sherwin, M.A.* "There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution." This was the testimony of Eugenie Scott to the Texas State Board of Education in January when the Board was debating new state science curriculum standards.1 Dr. Scott is Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a watchdog group committed to exposing and ridiculing any group that questions the strange paradigm of Darwinism. Is it true "there are no weaknesses" in this particles-to-people worldview? Clearly, there is a very real problem with what biological molecules (DNA and...

Fish Studies Answer Flood Question by Brian Thomas, M.S.* According to the Bible, the world before Noah’s Flood, including the oceans, must have been idyllic. That was destroyed by the year-long global deluge, during which the earth’s land mass broke into continents, massive amounts of sediment were deposited and then partially eroded, and new and perhaps deeper oceans became more salty from continental runoff. If this historical picture is accurate, then at least one area of confusion needs to be addressed: How did “saltwater fish” live through all that?...

150 Years Later, Fossils Still Don't Help Darwin by Brian Thomas, M.S.* “Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, aka missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false,” according to a recent LiveScience article that then describes what it claims are 12 specific transitional form fossils.1 But do these examples really confirm Darwinism?Charles Darwin raised a lack of transitional fossils as a possible objection to his own theory: “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?”2 Later in this chapter of his landmark book, he...

LONDON (Reuters) - Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years, longer than previously thought. Internal fertilization was widespread among prehistoric fish living on ancient tropical coral reefs in the Devonian period, research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday showed. The discovery sheds new light on the reproductive history of all jawed vertebrates, including humans. "It shifts how we think about how reproduction evolved. You're a jawed vertebrate and I'm a jawed vertebrate, so this is our own history," said Zerina Johanson, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Johanson and colleagues...

BANGKOK, Thailand – The fossilized remains of two pregnant fish indicate that sex as we know it — fertilization of eggs inside a female — took place as much as 30 million years earlier than previously thought, researchers said Thursday. Scientists from Australia and Britain studying 380 million-year-old fossils of the armored placoderm fish, or Incisoscutum richiei, said they were initially confused when they realized that the two fish were carrying embryos. They originally thought the fish laid their eggs before fertilization. "Once we found embryos in this group, we knew they had internal fertilization. But how the hell are...

Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles' Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists. Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum's collection from the period, already the largest in the world. Among their finds,...

With the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin this week, people around the world are celebrating his role as the father of evolutionary theory. Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory. One frequently cited "hole" in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, aka missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.

Hairs that likely belonged to humans living 195,000 to 257,000 years ago in Africa have been identified in fossilized brown hyena dung, according to a new study that describes the first non-bony material in the early human fossil record. Until now, the oldest known human hairs were from a 9,000-year-old Chinchorro mummy from Arica, northern Chile. This latest discovery, made at Gladysvale cave, South Africa, exceeds the mummy's age by about 200,000 years.

The skull of Basilosaurus, from the 1907 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1900 the famous bone sharp Barnum Brown discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur in Wyoming, and near its bones were a few fossilized bony plates. When H.F. Osborn described this creature as Dynamosaurus imperiosus he used this association to hypothesize that this predator was covered in armor, but as it turned out "Dynamosaurus" was really a representative of another new dinosaur Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex. Osborn's famous tyrant showed no sign of being covered with armor, and the bony body covering turned out to...

Arctic find challenges the idea that the massive reptiles declined slowly. A new fossil find suggests the dinosaurs may have died out quickly.Ablestock / Alamy Fossils uncovered recently in the Arctic support the idea that dinosaurs died off rapidly — perhaps as the result of a massive meteor hitting Earth. The finding contravenes the idea that dinosaurs were already declining by this time.Geological evidence indicates that an impact occurred near the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago. But whether the event created an all-out apocalypse that wiped out the dinosaurs is still a matter...

A nearly complete skull of a primitive cheetah that sprinted about in China more than 2 million years ago suggests the agile cats originated in the Old World rather than in the Americas.

JINAN, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- A dinosaur fossil field discovered this year in eastern China appears to be the largest in the world, a paleontologist told Xinhua on Monday.

When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green. The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had...

Story via AP, so follow link to read. The fossil field formally known as the Pig Wallow Site at Badlands National Park will close for good at the end of this summer, 15 years after student paleontologists started unearthing prehistoric remains. "The main research of the site is to better understand how fossils are preserved and how bones accumulate in a particular setting. The main story also describes some of the fossil finds; gives the location and much more.

Figure of the fossil ostracod from the Dry Valleys. The specimen is less than 1 mm long, but preserves an array of soft tissues including legs and mouth parts. A new fossil discovery- the first of its kind from the whole of the Antarctic continent- provides scientists with new evidence to support the theory that the polar region was once much warmer. The discovery by an international team of scientists is published today (**Embargoed until 00.01 BST Wednesday 23 July**) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It involved researchers from the University of Leicester, North Dakota State University,...