One headline reads “Giant Prehistoric Toilet Found” another refers to the discovery of an ancient latrine. Don’t know how I missed those headlines when the first news was released. Surely had I seen that headline I would have had to clicked on it to find out what that was all about. The actual title, The... Continue Reading →
A volcano slides into the sea causing an 800 foot wave to crash onto into an adjacent island. As that wave crashes onto land it picks up 700-ton boulders and throws them uphill leaving them stranded far above their source. It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood movie but this is real. It happened in the Cape Verde Islands off of the west coast of Africa long ago.
A committed young-earth creationist, Dr. Todd Wood, and an equally committed evolutionary creationist, Dr. Darrel Falk, spend time with each other. At first both are suspicious of the other’s Christian credentials. One feels like he is thought to be a fool the other is concerned that he is looked down upon as a heretic. Through... Continue Reading →
You can learn a lot from a series of unfortunate events. Collapsed caves can leave entry holes on the surface that become hazards to local fauna. The image below is from inside a famous natural pitfall trap in Wyoming. The surface above is rather flat and prey running from a predator sometimes fall into this hole... Continue Reading →
They say diamonds are forever, but for geologists this saying doesn’t make much sense. They would agree that diamonds are for a long time—hundreds of millions if not billions of years—but not forever. Many lines of evidence reveal that one must go deep (more than 150 km) into the mantle of the Earth to find... Continue Reading →
Evidence of the antiquity of the Earth is everywhere we look if we have our eyes open and are pondering what we see. One such place is central Utah on a typical rocky mountainside above 8000 feet just southwest of Fish Lake. This is where you will find Pando. Pando is the name given to a... Continue Reading →
The Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is literally built on trillions of dead things. This fact would seem to support Ken Ham's popular response to what we would expect had the world been subject to a global flood: "Billions of dead things in rock layers..." But the fossils that form the foundation of his Ark park... Continue Reading →
Life is incredibly diverse. Millions of species fill the seas, land and skies of our planetary home. It seems as if there is no end to the discovery of new animals, plants and other life forms. As a biologist who teaches a class about plant diversity, I can always count on discovering a new group of plants... Continue Reading →
Every day dozens of articles are published that contain evidence that runs contrary to the young-earth creationist’ (YEC) view of earth’s history. The young-earth view proposes that much or most of the thousands of feet of fossil bearing rocks—and the fossils themselves—that make up the world’s land masses were deposited during a single catastrophic world-wide... Continue Reading →
Can scientists bring back an extinct dinosaur? Way back in 1990, a novel by Michael Crichton and subsequent movie by the same name, Jurassic Park, in 1993 used futuristic genomic biology to suggest how we might de-extinct the dinosaurs. Could we really retrieve dinosaur DNA from preserved dinosaur blood sucked up by an ancient mosquito and... Continue Reading →
The sedimentary rocks of the Earth hold vast quantities of fossils. Hundreds of years of careful observations have shown that fossils are far from random in their distribution but rather they appear in the geological column in a distinct pattern or order referred to as fossil succession. How can we explain the observed distribution of fossils in the... Continue Reading →
Peat bogs are a repository of the passage of time. They record changes in the earth's atmosphere and unique events such as ash falls from volcanic eruptions. Through careful analysis of bogs we can reconstruct the past just like we can reconstruct a crime from a crime scene. Peat bogs in Europe give us a unique window into the effects of human industry and landscape shift due to deforestation and agriculture and even longer term shifts in climate patterns.
Evidence that some features of earth's landscape are the product of processes acting over longer periods of time can be found everywhere we look. Some of this evidence, such as that from the Grand Canyon, may be familiar to us but other evidence is far less familiar but tells the same story. For example, high... Continue Reading →
What was the ecological state at the beginning of creation? Were perfectly suited plants and animals created for a perfect world, did these plants and animals adapt to a fallen world, or were they all created in a way that anticipated a fallen world? Put another way, did animals physically adapt to a postlapsarian (after... Continue Reading →
Errors repeated often enough take on the appearance of truth. This is what makes fake news so effective. It can drown out informed opinion and accurate information. At the root of many fake new stories are pieces of information that are either outright false but possibly surrounded with true statements or the facts they report... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 