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Cnidarian Venom Evolution: Nothing New Under the Sun

Cnidarians appear to have recruited as toxins the same kinds of proteins recruited by many other venomous animals. However, toxin diversity within groups of organisms does not appear to be related to the alleged evolutionary history of the various groups.

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Different Colors on Different Soils

The specific genes have been identified that cause a lizard to match the black rocks it lives on.

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The Giant Flightless Birds Have Similar Changes in Regulatory Genes Leading to Flightlessness

Is the genetic basis of loss of flight due to mutations in protein-coding genes or in regulatory genes?

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Two Jellyfish Genomes Are as Different as Humans and Sea Urchins

Comparison of genomes of jellyfish and sea anemones highlights the importance of orphan genes in taxonomically close organisms.

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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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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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Preservation of Dinosaur Soft Tissue: An Update

“You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This verse from Genesis 3 captures very well the fate of beautifully designed organisms after the entrance of sin into the world. But how long does it take for the organic molecules we are made of to break down after death? In general, the longer the time from death, the larger the amount of decay that should be observed. This is particularly true for soft…

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Homo naledi: An update

Two important papers were published in May 2017, warranting an update on the subject of Homo naledi.

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What Is the Evidence for a Large Asteroid Impact at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) Boundary?

The hypothesis of a large meteorite impacting the surface of the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous was introduced almost four decades ago. In the ensuing years, the geologic community gathered a large body of data in support of this hypothesis, elevating it to the status of a universally accepted fact of Earth history. However, competing models and lively discussions are still unfolding over the dynamics and environmental consequences of this large impact.

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