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An Amphibious Whale or a Terrestrial Swimmer?

Is a recent fossil found in Peru evidence for transitional forms in an evolutionary sequence?

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Genetic Similarity Does Not Necessarily Mean Common Inheritance

Different populations of stickleback fish have parallel genetic adaptations to similar local habitats.

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Trilobite Explosion

The abrupt appearance of trilobites in Cambrian strata and their absence in Precambrian sediments is a real feature of the rock record and not due to failure of preservation in Precambrian rocks.

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The Cambrian Explosion at Qingjiang

A newly described Cambrian locality in China has added more than 50 new species to our knowledge.

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How Long do Fossils Take to Form?

The study of fossils and the associated rocks in which they are preserved gives us information about ancient conditions in which organisms lived, called paleoenvironments, and the pathways leading to their fossilization.

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What a Wood Warbler Can Tell us About “Filling the Earth”

Hybridization among wood warblers suggests “filling the earth” through dispersal, speciation and adaptation to local habitats.

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Mr. Potato Head and Evolutionary Anomalies

Much effort has been expended in attempts to arrange living organisms in a pattern based on genealogy. However, a tree-like pattern is not as evident as evolutionary theory would predict.

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Caenorhabditis elegans as a Model to Understand the Role of Epigenetic Heritage in Microevolution

In recent decades, epigenetics has been shown to be a promising field of research, since it describes changes in inheritance patterns that do not involve DNA modifications and are related to interactions between the organism and the environment. Epigenetic marks are chemical changes that occur in chromosomes and result in the silencing or activation of specific genes in different tissues. It has been…

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Modern Bird Lung Design Documented in Rapidly Buried Fossil

A fossil bird recovered from Cretaceous lake deposits in China shows preservation of some soft tissues, including a pair of lungs that appear to have functioned in a way similar to those of living birds.

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Some Things We Can Know

EDITORIAL. Those who study historical topics such as origins often face questions for which no easy answers are evident. Nevertheless, there are some things that can be known, and these should not be overlooked. Published in Origins, n. 65.

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What Vain Pursuit

A review of the book, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Critique. Theistic evolution, the notion that God is the director of Darwinian-style evolution, is a vain attempt to combine contradictory views of earth history. Published in Origins, n. 65.

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Pterosaurs of the Triassic: An Update

This post complements an article that was written in 2014. Since then, there have been some interesting developments in the area of Triassic pterosaurs that are worth mentioning, the most important being the recent description by Britt et al. (2018) of a Triassic pterosaur from the Nugget Sandstone of Utah.

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Is There Biological Evidence of Life's Recent Creation?

During one of my frequent visits to the office of my high school headmaster, his individual tutelage yielded a life lesson that I’ve never forgotten. His exact words were, “You think you’re right!” Of course I thought I was right, wouldn’t anyone who thought they were wrong change their mind and then immediately think they are right? Now that I’m an adult biologist, I still think that I’m right. Inevitably…

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DNA and Design

Imagine walking down the beach and coming across the words “Romeo loves Juliet” written in the sand. Most of us have experienced something like this and would not be surprised, but most people would be surprised to find the entire text of William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet written in sand. Why is this? The obvious reason is that sand is the wrong material for large writing projects. Sand grains…

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Archaeopteryx: Bird or Reptile? Or Not?

Archaeopteryx is arguably the most famous fossil ever discovered. It has a mixture of bird-like and reptile-like traits, and was first reported only two years after Charles Darwin published his book, The Origin of Species. Since then, another eleven Archaeopteryx specimens have been recovered from the limestones near Solnhofen, Germany.

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Organisms in Their Niche: Passive Modeling Clay or Problem-Solving Entities?

One person’s cultural background can bias their view about people from other cultures… even before they have ever met. Could people also have a bias about how they think about other creatures? It may even be possible that scientific culture could prejudice the way researchers see creature-environmental relations with the potential to bias whole research programs.

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Fossils of the Galápagos: A Review with Implications for Creationist Models

Volcanic outcrops in the Galápagos Archipelago do not appear to provide the wealth of specimens found in other fossil-rich localities around the world. However, fossils are indeed present in the Galápagos Islands. This brief review addresses the where, what, when, and why of fossils in the Galápagos Islands and closes with a discussion of their potential contribution to the development of models on…

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Is Homo naledi Your “Relative,” “Ancestor,” or “Part of the Human Family Tree”?

The aim of this article is to use the example of Homo naledi to illustrate the distinction between data and interpretations, and to discuss some of the questions a biblical creationist might have in relation to this new discovery.

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Patterns in the Fossil Record, Part 2

A general note of caution is necessary in the discussion of patterns in the fossil record. As with many other aspects of the natural world, the complexity that we find in this field of study tends to transcend our idealized categorizations.

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Patterns in the Fossil Record, Part 1

Fossils are remains of organisms or traces of their activity preserved in the rock record. The scientific significance of fossils is truly remarkable, because they represent the only available archive of past forms of life. Through fossils, not only can we reconstruct the morphology of extinct creatures but also infer aspects of their ecology and environment. Fossils are also very relevant in discussions…

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