It was an exciting week here at ICR as we watched workers carefully mount nine fossil replicas to the Discovery Center’s exterior wall. Each 12ˈ×12ˈ panel weighs 3,500 pounds! Two of them are based on fossils in ICR’s collection. Artisans carved the replicas out of modeling clay and cast them in concrete.

Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. and Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D.

The junk DNA paradigm has proven to be an ill-founded icon of evolution. We’ve witnessed its pet sub-theories systematically debunked as we learn more and more about how creatures’ DNA systems work. And now one of the pet darlings of junk DNA speculation, the alleged useless nature of introns (intervening noncoding pieces of genes), has also been tossed in the evolutionary trash heap.

The recent discovery of thirty new exoplanets in other solar systems presents another challenge to the most popular secular theory of planet formation.^1,2 These exoplanets are smaller versions of our gas giant Saturn. A recent survey shows that these intermediate gas giants are ten times more common than predicted by the secular theory.³