Stumptown Brewery in Guerneville, California, brews its beer according to a unique formula. Although standard ingredients such as malt and hops are used, the yeast that is added is supposedly 45 million years old.¹ The yeast was found in the digestive tract of a bee encased in amber. How could yeast cells survive and still be able to make beer after such a long time?

Venus flytraps are carnivorous plants. They have delicate, yet precisely engineered, trigger-activated leaves that can snap shut on insects in less than one third of a second. Their origin has baffled evolutionary botanists. If their exquisite and unique trap doors evolved, then what did they evolve from, and how?

Certain bacteria can detect direction with ultra-tiny magnets that use bits of magnetic metals organized into structures called “magnetosomes.” Magnetosomes automatically orient to the earth’s magnetic field, and the bacteria use this information as a kind of cellular GPS when they’re traveling.

The evolutionary story is one of constant change. It proposes that simpler life forms evolved into complicated organisms whose offspring branched out in ever more diverse directions. But the modern forms of some creatures are so similar to their ancestors’ fossils that it is clear they haven’t changed much at all. If some species diversified, why didn’t others?

Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer’s discoveries of soft blood vessels, proteins, various blood cells, and even DNA inside fossilized dinosaur bones have been met with extreme skepticism from the scientific community. It has been well established that such biological structures and molecules should not last beyond a few tens of thousands of years, and could not possibly survive millions of years.