Category: stasis
A Big Bang of insects in the mid- to late Triassic
| September 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
About 237 million years ago: The sites underscore that this burst of evolution took place much earlier than researchers had thought, particularly for water-loving insects. Among the remains are fossil dragonflies, caddisflies, water boatmen, and aquatic beetles. Until now, paleontologists had thought such aquatic insects didn’t diversify until 130 million years ago. These insects—which include […]
Beetle trapped in amber 99 mya offers window into prehistoric ecology
| August 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
Amber is, in some ways, like a very-slow motion vid. From ScienceDaily: Flowering plants are well known for their special relationship to the insects and other animals that serve as their pollinators. But, before the rise of angiosperms, another group of unusual evergreen gymnosperms, known as cycads, may have been the first insect-pollinated plants. Now, […]
Stasis: Dinosaur-era baby snake looks just like modern ones
| July 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: Scientists working in Myanmar have uncovered a nearly 100-million-year-old baby snake encased in amber. Dating back to the Late Cretaceous, it’s the oldest known baby snake in the fossil record, and the first snake known to have lived in a forested environment. … The discovery of a baby snake fossilized […]
Lizards and snakes backdated to Permian era, lizards lost or changed limbs many times
| June 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From at ScienceDaily: The 240-million-year-old fossil, Megachirella wachtleri, is the most ancient ancestor of all modern lizards and snakes, known as squamates, the new study, published today in the journal Nature, shows. The fossil, along with data from both living and extinct reptiles — which involved anatomical data drawn from CT scans and DNA — […]
Gunter Bechly: “Living fossils” under massive attack
| May 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From David Klinghoffer at ENST: If you ever encounter a horseshoe crab on the beach, you are a looking at a creature that would not have appeared out of place hundreds of millions of years ago. Arthropods breathtakingly similar to this, says paleontologist Günter Bechly, go back “almost a half billion years without significant morphological […]
Colorful moth wings dated back to nearly 200 million years ago
| April 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, stasis |
From Laurel Hamers at Science News: Tiny light-scattering structures that give today’s butterflies and moths their brilliant hues date back to the days of the dinosaurs. Fossilized mothlike insects from the Jurassic Period bear textured scales on their forewings that could display iridescent colors, researchers report April 11 in Science Advances. The fossils are the […]
Researchers: Plants colonized Earth 100 mya earlier than thought
| February 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Plants, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade. The timing of this episode has […]
Stasis: Horses still have all five original digits, say researchers
| January 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: While it is largely believed that horses simply evolved with fewer digits, researchers pose a new theory that suggests remnants of all five toes are still present within the hooves of the horse. For the first time, as published in the January 24 issue of Royal Society Open Science, NYITCOM researcher, Nikos Solounias, […]
Fierce arthropod with “sophisticated head” from 508 mya
| January 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: Paleontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto have entirely revisited a tiny yet exceptionally fierce ancient sea creature called Habelia optata that has confounded scientists since it was first discovered more than a century ago. In those days, we had it all sewn […]
Stasis: Fossil brittlestar at 435 mya is pretty much what a brittlestar would be today
| January 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From Lorna Siggins at the Irish Times: Though this species of brittle star (which are closely related to starfish) first developed nearly half a billion years ago, its modern day descendants are remarkably similar. … According to Doyle, this brittle star is incredibly resilient — it was around during the Silurian period, when the […]
“Confounding”: Moths and butterflies predate flowering plants by millions of years
| January 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: They predate the Createous period, moths and butterflies existed earlier than the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago. A team of scientists report on new evidence that primitive moths and butterflies existed during the Jurassic period, approximately 50 million years earlier than the first flowering plants, shedding new light on one […]
Photosynthesis pushed back even further. Time to revisit the “Boring Billion” claim
| January 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, stasis |
Past time, really. From ScienceDaily: Maybe the ‘Boring Billion’ wasn’t so boring, after all The world’s oldest algae fossils are a billion years old, according to a new analysis by earth scientists at McGill University. Based on this finding, the researchers also estimate that the basis for photosynthesis in today’s plants was set in place […]
Researchers: Sponges definitely oldest animals, not “anatomically complex” comb jellies
| December 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
This is a complex and long-running dispute. From ScienceDaily: Commenting on the breakthrough research, Professor Pisani said: “The fact is, hypotheses about whether sponges or comb jellies came first suggest entirely different evolutionary histories for key animal organ systems like the nervous and the digestive systems. Therefore, knowing the correct branching order at the root […]
Genetic Literacy Project objects to the term “living fossils” as applied to humans
| December 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
So do they think that we humans will evolve into separate species as a result of migration and founder effects? If not, what does “evolution” mean? From David Warmflash at the Genetic Literacy Project: The goblin shark, duck-billed platypus, lungfish, tadpole shrimp, cockroach, coelacanths and the horseshoe crab — these creatures are famous in the world […]
Humans 250k years older than thought? Arose in multiple places?
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From Will Dunham at Reuters, Genetic data from the skeletal remains of seven people who lived centuries ago in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province is offering intriguing new evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, is older than previously believed. Scientists said on Thursday they sequenced the genomes of the seven individuals including a boy who lived […]
Stasis: Early trilobites had stomachs, contrary to earlier assumptions
| September 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: Exceptionally preserved trilobite fossils from China, dating back to more than 500 million years ago, have revealed new insights into the extinct marine animal’s digestive system. Published today in the journal PLOS ONE, the new study shows that at least two trilobite species evolved a stomach structure 20 million years earlier than previously […]
Earlier than thought: Worm burrows at rock layers over 600 million years ago
| September 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: The fossils were discovered in sediment in the Corumbá region of western Brazil, near the border with Bolivia. The burrows measure from under 50 to 600 micrometres or microns (?m) in diameter, meaning the creatures that made them were similar in size to a human hair which can range from 40 to 300 […]
Repositioning of ray-finned fish sends shock waves through fish family tree
| September 5, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: For several decades, scientists have placed polypterids down near the base of the family tree of ray-finned fish, a large group believed to have originated around 385 million years ago. But a new study that used CT scans to probe three-dimensionally preserved fossil fish skulls shakes up the fish family tree by concluding […]
Symbiosis found in Cambrian fossil worms
| September 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: Symbiotic relationships, which involve two different kinds of organism interacting with close physical contact, are common in nature. However, few prehistoric examples involve soft-bodied animals because they are normally not fossilized. Although fossils of the two species of marine worm, Cricocosmia jinnigensis and Mafangscolex sinensi, have been found before, these are the first […]
From LiveScience: What is the oldest continuous living thing in the world?
| September 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
As Stephanie Pappas writes, it’s much more complex than we might think: In 2013, researchers from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program reported at the annual Goldschmidt Conference in Italy that they’d found microbes in 100-million-year-old sediments in the floor of the deep sea, according to the BBC. The microbes were reproducing once every 10,000 years, […]
