That’s no beaver

Brian Thomas writes: Researchers in 2006 described a fossil they named Castorocauda. They found it in a sedimentary layer mixed with pterosaurs, insects, amphibians, a dinosaur, and a gastropod. It “has a broad, flattened, partly scaly tail analogous to that of modern beavers.” Maybe it was a beaver. (“Devils, Dinosaurs, and Squirrel Fossils,” January...

May 2015

2015

Happy new year! So I burnt out. Oops. It’s happened before, it will happen again, but this is certainly the longest so far. But I’m going to try to come back to it now – we’ll see how it goes. But besides its length, the other unusual part of this hiatus is that for the last five and a half months I’ve been completely out of the loop – neither answering...

May 2015

“Let’s quickly review some federal bankruptcy law”

James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D., never disappoints. If haven’t come across him before, and can’t figure it out from the degrees included in his authorship credit, he is the ICR’s main source of bizarre legal analogies, although he has also taken to (usually viking-related) history at times. For his column in the August edition of ICR’s monthly newsletter...

May 2015

Defining Dinosauria

Richard Owen poses next to a Dinornis (moa) skeleton in 1879—but is it a dinosaur? This group, which includes at least three well-established genera of Saurians, is characterized by a large sacrum composed of five anchylosed vertebrae of unusual construction, by the height and breadth and outward sculpturing of the neutral arch of the dorsal vertebrae,...

May 2015

Confounding the Patriarchs

In late 2013, as a response to an article by Brian Thomas rounding up what he considered the ICR’s greatest hits of the year, I wrote a post consisting of historical quotes altered to support each creationist claim Thomas brought up. For example – pertaining to the usual comet trope – Confucius almost certainly never said: Heaven, in the production...

May 2015

Disappearing Genes

We’re not actually talking about four-leaf clovers today. Gah, some real writers block on this one. Sometimes I get halfway through a post and I know what I want to say, but I can’t wrestle it into my usual style. It tends to happen when the topic is generally fairly boring, yet at the same time intensely interesting to me personally in a way that I...

May 2015

Creationist Peer Review

CEN Technical Journal (now CMI’s Journal of Creation) 13 (1) 1999 – source. The problem with peer review as practised by creationists, is that the peer reviewers are creationists. This is a cheap shot, I know, but I don’t mean it like that – not entirely, anyway. A more subtle point is that there aren’t a lot of so-called creation scientists, and they...

May 2015

We Don’t Know Everything About Electric Fish

There are six different lineages of so-called “electric fish,” each of which evolved its potential independently and convergently. The most famous of these is the electric eel, though speaking of convergent evolution that species is not actually an eel. The portion of the body that produces the electric field is called the “electric organ,” and appears...

May 2015

URCall: A Cringe Compendium

A sorry sight at any blog We’ve been looking at it’s videos lately, but URCall – the ICR’s latest attempt to be hip with the youth – has other provinces in its media empire. They have a blog, for example, in which a faint and whispery voice cries out for comments: “what do you think?” it asks. Let’s take a look at what they’ve got. Content warning:...

May 2015

Crooked Dealer at Sima de los Huesos

A fossil from Sima de los Huesos. While other groups of young-Earth creationists may hold differing opinions, the Institute for Creation Research insists that Neanderthals were humans too. This is all very well, but for reasons that are not at all clear they take this position to the extreme, minimising, misreporting, or denying any genetic and morphological...

May 2015