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 →
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 →
If a global Flood destroyed all humans except Noah and his family just 4350 years ago, where are all the human fossils? This is a question that any young-earth apologist must be prepared to answer. It’s a perfectly natural and appropriate question. After all, according to young-earth creationists (YECs), nearly all fossil remains of dinosaurs,... Continue Reading →
On the Greek Island of Lesvos there is a World Heritage Site which includes hundreds of petrified trees and countless other fossils. Many of these petrified trees are found standing upright with root systems intact. A variety of tree species have been identified including a species similar to the giant sequoia trees found today in California.... Continue Reading →
Please welcome Lars Cade* as a guest blogger on Naturalis Historia. I am a Christian currently studying to become a paleontologist. While I still have much more that I need to learn before I could properly consider myself one, I know enough of the discipline to know when it is being misrepresented. Unfortunately, the young-earth... Continue Reading →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) are at odds with each other about whether a large collection of fossils found deep in a South African cave should be categorized as humans (Homo naledi) or apes. But what about other hominin fossils that the scientific community have generally considered the remains of distant relatives of humans? What about... Continue Reading →
Thousands of bone fragments have now been reported from chambers deep in the same cave system in South Africa. They belong to what has been described as a new hominid species; Homo naledi. When the first set of bones and the context in which they were recovered were revealed, young-earth creationists (YECs) scrambled to set the... Continue Reading →
So how long can DNA or even cells survive in the environment once an organism dies? This has been a topic of considerable debate in the scientific literature since the advent of high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques. This growing field of scientific inquiry is fascinating to me and promises to shed new light on old questions. I have... Continue Reading →
A remarkable trace fossil has given us a glimpse into the environmental conditions of a Jurassic seafloor. Ammonite fossils are common in Jurassic rocks but one particular ammonite is more unusual than most. In the horizontal layer of rock where it was found a 28 foot-long line of shallow grooves was found leading right up to the... Continue Reading →
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