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The Hallucigenia sparsa. (Caron et al., Proc. Royal Soc. B, 2013) We sort of take for granted the depictions of prehistoric beasties illustrated in the books of our childhood. But piecing together Earth's murky past is a lot harder than it sounds. Scientists have to rely on fragmentary bones, weathered footprints, impressions in rock – these don't always capture the fine details of the complex, living, breathing animal that passed through or died there. Sometimes, while doing this painstaking work, researchers get it wrong. And not just a little wrong! Here are some of our favorite fossil flubs, and what...

A solution to the puzzle which came to be known as ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Oxford in a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society. ‘To the question of why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these…periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer’, Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, summarizing what came to be known as ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ – the lack of...

New fossils and sites are helping make sense of the mysterious flowering of animal life half a billion years ago The drumming of the jackhammer deepens. Then, a block of shale butterflies open, exposing to crisp mountain air a surface that hasn't seen sunlight in half a billion years. “Woo!” says paleontologist Cédric Aria of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, bracing the top slab of rock upright.Its underside bears charcoal-colored smudges that look vaguely like horseshoe crabs or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. “It's a spaceship landing area here,” says expedition leader Jean-Bernard Caron, curator...

Elizabeth Palermo September 15, 2015An artist's depiction of the dual meteor strike. (Don Dixon/Erik Sturkell/University of Gothenburg) It's not altogether uncommon to hear about double rainbows, but what about a double meteor strike? It's a rare event, but researchers in Sweden recently found evidence that two meteors smacked into Earth at the same time, about 458 million years ago. Researchers from the University of Gothenburg uncovered two craters in the county of Jämtland in central Sweden. The meteors that formed the craters landed just a few miles from each other at the same moment, according to Erik Sturkell, a professor...

Another scientific study has been released offering the controversial claim that there’s a decent chance the octopus (and the rest of the cephalopods) arrived on Earth in the form of frozen eggs 250 million years ago and actually evolved on another world. … This wasn’t the first group to suggest it. In 2015 another research group reached a similar conclusion. The more you read into it, the less crazy it sounds. As we’ve studied the various animals on the planet in ever deeper detail, the octopus really doesn’t seem to fit in with everything else. They’re an invertebrate, but they...

Earth has seen its share of catastrophes, the worst being the “big five” mass extinctions scientists traditionally talk about. Now, paleontologists are arguing that a sixth extinction, 260 million years ago, at the end of a geological age called the Capitanian, deserves to be a member of the exclusive club. In a new study, they offer evidence for a massive die-off in shallow, cool waters in what is now Norway. That finding, combined with previous evidence of extinctions in tropical waters, means that the Capitanian was a global catastrophe. “It’s the first time we can say this is a true...

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much. Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports. One, by scientists at...

Fossil Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale Courtesy of M. R. Smith / Smithsonian InstituteThe spines along its back were thought to be legs, its legs thought to be tentacles along its back, and its head was mistaken for its tail. The animal, known as Hallucigenia due to its otherworldly appearance, had been considered an ‘evolutionary misfit’ as it was not clear how it related to modern animal groups. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered an important link with modern velvet worms, also known as onychophorans, a relatively small group of worm-like animals that live in tropical...

New Haven, Conn. — The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth’s surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth’s landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that existed at a crucial period in Earth’s evolutionary history called the Cambrian explosion, when most of the major groups of complex animals rapidly...

A new concept making its way through the scientific community holds that just a few key changes in the right genes will result in a whole new life form as different from its progenitor as a bird is from a lizard![1] This idea is being applied to a number of key problems in the evolutionary model, one of which is the lack of transitional forms in both the fossil record and the living (extant) record. The new concept supposedly adds support to the "punctuated equilibrium" model proposed by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Dr. Gould derived his ideas...

HUNTSVILLE, AL, Nov. 25 Christian Newswire -- Two creation films called "inappropriate" were denied the opportunity to be shown in government facilities this week--which marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". While the intelligent design film "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record" has not been granted permission for a showing in California, "The Mysterious Islands", a new 90-minute Vision Forum film that challenges Darwin's evolution by taking audiences back to engage the enchanted Galapagos Islands, has enjoyed a victory and will premiere as previously scheduled tonight, Nov. 25, at 6:30 PM, at...

More details are now coming out from the lawsuit filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), filed in the Superior Court for the State of California for the County of Los Angeles (Central District). AFA's lawsuit contends that the California Science Center engaged in viewpoint discrimination when cancelling AFA's contract to screen the pro-intelligent design (ID) documentary Darwin’s Dilemma at the Center’s IMAX Theatre on October 25th. As discussed below, AFA's complaint contains e-mails from California Science Center staff revealing that the Center cared more about how it would be perceived by ID-critics in the...

Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design --snip-- (CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon. Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that...

Storming the Beaches of Norman Norman, Oklahoma, that is. Okay, so there aren’t any real beaches in Norman, Oklahoma. But when Steve Meyer and I went there recently, the Darwinists who have installed themselves as absolute dictators at the University of Oklahoma (OU) made our arrival feel like D-Day. On September 28, Steve gave a talk on his best-selling book Signature in the Cell at the Oklahoma Memorial Union on the OU campus. The following evening, September 29, Steve and I answered questions after a showing of the new film Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History,...

Ediacaran assemblages immediately predate the Cambrian explosion of metazoans and should have played a crucial role in this radiation. Their wider relationships, however, have remained refractory and difficult to integrate with early metazoan phylogeny. Here, we describe a frondlike fossil, Stromatoveris (S. psygmoglena sp. nov.), from the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstätte (Yunnan, China) that is strikingly similar to Ediacaran vendobionts. The exquisite preservation reveals closely spaced branches, probably ciliated, that appear to represent precursors of the diagnostic comb rows of ctenophores. Therefore, this finding has important implications for the early evolution of this phylum and related diploblasts, some of which...

Science is typically praised as open-ended and free, pursuing the evidence wherever it leads. Scientific conclusions are falsifiable, open to further inquiry, and revised as new data emerge. Science is free of dogma, intolerance, censorship, and persecution. By these standards, Darwinists have become the dogmatists. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, supported by American taxpayers, are punishing one of their own simply for publishing an article about Intelligent Design. Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, wrote an article titled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." As...

Newly discovered fossils from China seem to be the oldest multi-celled animals yet found that were complex enough to have a two-sided body plan rather than a round one. The report on the creatures, published online Friday by the journal Science, is the latest in a series of fossil finds that downplays a supposed surge of species and diversity in body styles believed to have happened rather suddenly 540 million years ago. The episode, known as the Cambrian explosion, has been generating controversy for more than a century because it marked the point in pre-history where fossils for virtually all...

An Australian biologist believes the evolution of vision may hold the key to animal life as we know it, writes Deborah Smith. Dr Andrew Parker will never forget his first dive over the Great Barrier Reef. Even as a biologist, he was surprised by the blaze of colour and vast array of creatures he saw in the water. And, in a memorable encounter, he came eye-to-eye with a large group of cuttlefish. The small molluscs, watching the human intruder closely, put on a spectacular wave of colour changes: the brown bleaching from their bodies as he first approached, followed by...

Live Moderated Chat: Paul Nelson Transcript from February 5, 2003 9:00-10:15 PM Eastern Copyright © by International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design 2003. ISCID Moderator Our guest speaker today is Paul Nelson. Dr. Nelson is a philosopher of biology, specializing in evo-devo and developmental biology. He is also a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. Dr. Nelson received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Department of Philosophy. His thesis critiques aspects of macroevolutionary theory in light of recent developments in embryology and developmental biology. Entitled "On Common Descent", it will be published as...

ISCID Press ReleaseA Chat with Paul Nelson on the Cambrian Explosion Press Release ISCID is pleased to announce the following online event that is free and open to the entire internet public: Ontogenetic Depth as a Complexity Metric for the Cambrian Explosion. A chat with Paul Nelson* February 5th, 2003 9pm Eastern http://www.iscid.org/paul-nelson.php *Paul Nelson is a philosopher of biology, specializing in evo-devo and developmental biology. He is also a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. Dr. Nelson received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Department of Philosophy. His thesis critiques aspects of macroevolutionary theory...