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 →
A few weeks ago I criticized Ken Ham and several of his Answers in Genesis' colleagues for stating that some living birds have teeth like those of fossil birds. I pointed out that none of the 10,000 living bird species produce true teeth. However, there were some birds that lived alongside dinosaurs during the Cretaceous... Continue Reading →
Some passages of scripture contain detailed natural history information about animals. The book of Job, in particular, records many physical and behavioral traits of animals. One such animal described in Job is the ostrich. The ostrich we know today is a strange bird. It is very large, its wings are not able to provide flight... Continue Reading →
The book of Job contains the most descriptive language about the natural world in all of Scripture. In Job 39 alone, we find God (1) describing the natural history of animals including the mountain goat, deer, donkey, ostrich, horse, hawk and eagle in order to illustrate His omniscience and wisdom in creation. Although the authorship... Continue Reading →
Can human footprints made in wet sand dunes be preserved as fossils? The discovery of up to thirty-five human (1) footprints on the roof of a small coastal cave says “yes.” Footprints on the roof of a cave? How does that happen? I wondered that too when I first heard about this remarkable discovery. The... Continue Reading →
Not long ago I wrote this post criticizing Ken Ham and his research team for their outright errors and misinformed understanding of ancient fossil birds. Subsequently, Ken Ham, with help from his research team, penned a second blog post entitled, “The Duck-Relative That’s Just a Duck.” In that article Ken Ham doesn’t correct his erroneous comparison of... Continue Reading →
Last year I was invited to write an essay reflection on Douglas Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed for the periodical Sapientia (Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding an outreach of TEDS --Trinity Evangelical Divinity School). That essay, Undeniably Limited: Designing a Box in Which to Find the... Continue Reading →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) are actively promoting a radical new model of the origin of the diversity of life on Earth. (1) This speculative view borrows a number of elements found in any typical evolutionary biology textbook. For example, modern YECs claim that most and possibly all species alive today—except humans—are related to numerous other species... 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 →
A tidal wave of genomic information seems to wash up on shore each year. In 2014, an especially large wave - in those days long ago! - came ashore in the form of 45 entire genome sequences of birds. The relevance of these genomes and their hundreds of billions of letters of code representing all... Continue Reading →
The accidental discovery of a wealth of bones and plant remains preserved in ancient sediments of a high mountain lake in Colorado has opened a window into a past world. These remains add to the already abundant evidence from across North America that not long ago the climate and animals that populated the continent were... Continue Reading →
Mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, giant bison and giant sloths roaming the mountainsides of the Rocky Mountains may seem like something that only Hollywood could dream up but there is abundant evidence that North America was once home to a thriving community of animals that today we might associate with the African Serengeti. Previously (The Snowmastodon... Continue Reading →
Near the top of a 9000-foot-high mountain ridge lies a small reservoir dug out of an alpine meadow. Today, the Ziegler Reservoir acts as a water source for the ski village of Snowmass, Colorado, but long before this site was an alpine meadow, it was an ancient lake around whose shores lived mastodons, mammoths, camels—yes... Continue Reading →
Recently I shared evidence of an ancient forest preserved in amazing detail by volcanic ash (An Ancient and Alien Forest Reconstructed: A challenge for young earth creationism). I posed a number of challenging questions that this spectacular fossil discovery raises for those that hold to a young-earth creationist' (YEC) understanding of earth's history. Since then,... Continue Reading →
Fossils often provide us with only a fragmentary view of the distant past but sometimes collections of fossils record ancient and seemingly alien worlds in stunning clarity. In the past decade several notable fossil discoveries have permitted the reconstruction of entire forest ecosystems that existed at various points in time and space in earth history. Today,... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 