Fossil Fibers Befuddle Dinosaur Evolution

Evolutionary museums and textbooks have often portrayed modern birds as the descendants of dinosaurs, a story that has been presented without empirical support. Now, a new "feathered" dinosaur discovery has thrown a wrench into the already dysfunctional machinery of the dino-to-bird tale.


What Is a Turtle Fossil Doing in the Arctic?

A fossilized turtle shell, along with a host of lithified tropical plants and animals, has been discovered on Axel Heiberg Island in the High Canadian Arctic.1 This new find presents an enigma to those who believe that present processes are the key to interpreting the past (a view known as uniformitarianism).


The Permian Extinction: Good Science, Bad Assumptions

Ninety percent of marine and 70 percent of terrestrial creatures perished suddenly in an event variously called the Permian extinction, the Permian–Triassic (P-Tr) extinction, or the Great Dying. The calamity’s cause, referred to as the K-T event, remains unknown, even though asteroid impact has been in vogue.


What Does It Take to Fossilize a Brain?

Scientists have accidently discovered a rare and perhaps unique fossilized brain of an iniopterygian, an extinct kind of ratfish or chimaera that supposedly lived 300 million years ago.


Ancient Human Footprints Look Modern

Some scientists have estimated that sets of human footprints found on two separate but close sedimentary layers in Kenya are around 1.51 and 1.53 million years old1 and were made by humans like the “Turkana Boy,” an anatomically human fossil discovered within the same general area in 1984.2 But do these footprints clarify or confound the standard evolutionary explanations?

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