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Paleontology: Scientists have been studying the fossil of a snake-like creature with hind limbs. To cross-reference another discipline, some scholars think the wording of the curse on the serpent in Genesis indicates the creature was limbed before it was doomed to "eat dust" and crawl on its belly.

Human biology: Meanwhile, here's a video of an Asian Indian baby girl who through a strange congenital defect was born with two faces. Doctors say the deformity is a unusual case of conjoined twins. Sadly, local Indian villagers are worshiping the baby as the reincarnation of a many-faced goddess, and the family has declined to allow doctors to CT-scan the child for internal abnormalities. Whatever the villagers and family think about the girl's divinity, she may not live long if they offer her incense instead of good medical care.

Preparing for the big one: Intel has publicly recognized the threat that the sun's coronal mass ejections (CME's) pose to the earth's computer systems, and is studying how to build a cosmic ray-proof computer.

And finally, here we go again: For 2008 climatologists predict yet another severe hurricane season. Never mind that the last two seasons were flops. 'Course I don't blame forecasters, who are undoubtedly doing the very best they can. But we could do without any shoreline scaremongering. After all, we know that whether hurricanes come or go, it's really global warming that's to blame.

A new species of titanosaur--and with a neck around 56 feet long, one of the largest--is being unearthed in Argentina. You can view photos of the fossils here and a video version of the story here.

 NASA has scheduled the launched of the shuttle Discovery for next Tuesday--although an inspection turned up microscopic cracks on the vehicle's heat shields.

The Washington Post reports a new strain of antibiotic-resistant staph virus is currently killing more Americans than HIV. The virus Staphylococcus aureus is causing "a significant public health problem." I visited an elderly man who was succumbing to a staph infection a couple weeks ago. Who knows if this was the strain he had.

 You've heard of dinosaur tracks, but how about reptile tracks? A fossil slab containing a jumble of reptile trackways has been found in Canada and is being touted as the earliest evidence for the existence of reptiles, supposedly pushing the evolution of the cold-blooded animals back another 1 to 3 million years "earlier than previously thought." This has got to drive the people who make those phylogeny charts nuts.

That's right, the Chicago Tribune reports Darwinian paleontologists are angry that the "Lucy" skeleton, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and hailed as an upright walking hominid, has begun a six-year tour of American Museums. Lucy's first stop is at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (exhibit opens Friday). Here's what Richard Leakey, a prominent evolutionary paleontologist who specializes in African hominid fossils, had to say about Lucy's travels:

It's a form of prostitution, it's gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity and it should not be permitted.

Ouch. However, the discoverer of Lucy, Donald Johanson, is OK with the traveling skeleton plan. "Seeing the original Lucy will surely heighten public awareness of human-origins studies particularly at a time when the validity of evolution has come under fire in our schools," he said. "A broader exposure of Lucy to the public does have great educational value."

Yes, and why be angry, anyway? Critics say the travels are too dangerous for the fragile fossil, or that it's wrong to not have the specimen available for scientific study. But as the Houston Museum pointed out to the Tribune, those objections are really groundless. Maybe Leakey actually does say it best: exploitation. To some paleontologists, Lucy's bones are not just fossils, they're sacred relics. Lucy's femur and tibia are practically the pillars of the holy faith of the Descent of Man. To pass the skeleton around to museum after museum is something akin to drawing cartoons of Muhammad. It offends the devout.

Meanwhile, 10 out of 15 Texan state school board members told the media they don't support ID being taught in schools. Interestingly the board chairman, who claims to be a creationist of sorts, thinks not only intelligent design but "anything" that doesn't have a scientific consensus should be rejected from public school curriculum. Good, that rules out Darwinism too. Wonder if the board knows. At any rate, 1 out of 3 isn't bad. Just wait 10 years. It'll be an exciting day when Kitzmiller vs. Dover is challenged in another court.

Maybe we won't have to wait ten years. This film by Ben Stein is going to speed things along.  

(Also: Gregory Koukl has some good thoughts on the creation of "Artificial Life", and Patrik Hagman on creationism in Turkey.)

ScienceDaily has published a news release from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology "speaking out" against the Creation Museum. They accuse the museum of "a vast number of scientific errors, large and small," including the promotion of a global flood and the view that dinosaurs and man lived together. From the release:

The fossil exhibits at the Creation Museum discount the last 150 years of paleontological and geological discovery. Not only are transitional fossils, including snakes with limbs and dinosaurs with feathers, abundant in the fossil record, but radiometric dating allows paleontologists to pinpoint the timing of major events in the ancient history of the earth.

For example, Tyrannosaurus rex existed over 65 million years ago, whereas modern humans didn’t show up on the scene until 200 thousand years ago. They never walked side by side.

Amazingly, the Creation Museum's fossil exhibits are displays of real fossils! They don't discount 150 years of discoveries, they simply challenge the interpretation of those discoveries, such as whether a global flood might be responsible for the fossil record. Any scientist knows that a challenge to interpretation is a healthy aspect of his trade.

As to scientific accuracy, this news release fails to divulge a couple important facts of its own: (1) Not all paleontologists believe fossils show dinosaurs had feathers (including Alan Feduccia, one of America's most respected bird evolution experts), and (2) radiometric dating is too scattered to "pinpoint" anything. If the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is really worried about people being scientifically misled, they'd better set an example first.

In other news: Scientists have now shown that the giant bugs of the fossil record grew large because of a once higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere, as creationists have long suspected.

Two stories about coelacanths break in an unfortunate juxtaposition for Darwinists: One claims a coelacanth fossil shows how limb evolution proceeded; another reports on a live coelacanth. The fact that coelacanths have allegedly thrived for 400 million years (and turned up as a "living fossil" after being labeled extinct) would seem to indicate that the fish's fins were always intended for water, not walking.

A group of fossilized trees is not fossilized. If you're puzzled, so are these scientists. 

Finally, whoever heard of a brain pacemaker? That's a reality now, and a successful test has allowed a man in a vegetative state to talk with his family and chew his food again.  

The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are in a bit of trouble. A 7 million square mile dust storm is churning across Mars, blocking sunlight from reaching the solar-powered machines. If the storm keeps at it, the rovers' electronics may fail and be permanently damaged by extreme cold. That would be too bad--although they've already lasted far beyond their expected mission duration.

In relation to the finding of plant and insect DNA beneath Greenland's ice sheet, here's an interesting report from 1897 about two Smithsonian scientists who discovered a fossilized "tropical forest" on the island. In spite of a fascinating description of Greenland's fauna and flora, geography, and native history, the report takes pains to interpret the fossil findings as evidence of long ages. The scientists deduce:

All the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that climates all over the world in that ancient epoch were pretty much the same. The same plants grew contemporaneously in Greenland and in California, in Spitzbergen and in Virginia. There was a uniformity of vegetation in all parts of the earth. Nobody can say just why this was, although several theories have been advanced to account for it. One theory is that the atmosphere in those days was heavily charged with watery vapor, so that warmth was readily distributed through it, and the sun's rays did not have a chance to strike the earth uninterrupted, making differences in climate by the degree of their slant. In the course of time the atmosphere thinned gradually, and then there [came] to be climatic variations marking a series of zones around the globe.

Uniformitarianism. Not much has changed in a century, eh? 

The "Hofmeyr skull", pictured above, was found in a dry riverbed in Hofmeyr, South Africa, in 1952. Although it represented a curious mixture of modern and "archaic" features, anthropologists were unable to procure an agreeable date for the specimen, and it went largely ignored over the years. But recently, anthropologist Frederick Grine has taken a new interest in the skull, applying modern dating techniques and leading a team to study the skull's morphological significance more closely. In the January 12 edition of Science, Grine's team asserted that the skull--dated to 36,000 years--was direct evidence for the theory that modern humans originated in sub-Sahara Africa and populated the Old World less than 70,000 years ago.

The problem: The "Out of Africa" hypothesis still requires a grand leap of faith. At least if it is to be taken dogmatically.

 Consider the words of Ted Goebel, anthropologist from Texas A&M University, who also published an article about the origins of modern humans in the January 12 Science magazine.

Current interpretations of the human fossil record indicate that fully modern humans emerged in sub-Saharan Africa by 195,000 years ago.  By 35,000 years ago, modern humans thrived at opposite ends of Eurasia, from France to island southeast Asia and even Australia.  How they colonized these and other drastically different environments during the intervening 160,000 years is one of the greatest untold stories in the history of humankind.   -HT: Creation-Evolution Headlines

According to a Max Planck news release, the skull "fills a significant void in the human fossil record of sub-Saharan Africa from the period between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago."

It appears, according to the proponents of the Hofmeyr skull themselves, that the skull is the only significant  paleontological support for the entire Out of Africa hypothesis. Don't they have a longer string of support to offer beside that?

Some DNA studies seem to trace human lineage to sub-Sahara Africa but, problematically, other genetic studies have pointed to non-African populations as contributing progenitors. The Max Planck release claims that "Until now, the lack of human fossils of appropriate antiquity from sub-Saharan Africa has meant that these competing genetic models of human evolution could not be tested by paleontological evidence."

Here's the evidence: Grine's team used optically stimulated luminescence dating and uranium-series dating to attain an age of 36,000 years for the fossil, which was apparently too decalcified to attempt carbon-dating. The dating tests were conducted on sand grains scraped from the inside of the skull vault (braincase), which had collected a hard carbonate layer.

As far as morphological features were concerned, the Hofmeyr skull resembled European fossil skulls presumed to be the same age or younger, but did not resemble the skulls of modern Khoe-San peoples, or "Bushmen," who are taken to represent the recent South African fossil record.

The question of the origin of modern man is a hotly contested debate in anthropological circles, and the Out of Africa hypothesis has come under criticism, some even suggesting that modern humans arose in Asia. It's unlikely that the Hofmeyr skull will be a lid on the case.

Creationists like myself reject many of the assumptions built into this debate, most importantly the belief that humans evolved from apes, a hypothesis that is itself represented by few definitive fossils. The historical descriptions contained in the Bible suggest modern man originated in the Near East, not the sub-Sahara. In addition, creationists interpret variations in skull and skeletal morphology to be the result of variations and degradations in the genetic code, not an upward path to "modern man" as evolutionists interpret.

Balancing a significant hypothesis on the dating outcome of a few grains of sand seems, to me, to indicate how fare-fetched the idea was in the first place.

Photo credit Frederick E. Grine

Yes, it's true--Those pictures of gallant warriors fighting two-headed dragons may be at least partially based on fact.  From that bottomless pit of headline-making dino fossils (China) comes a truly remarkable Choristoderan specimen. It has two heads.

This dinosaur was a long-necked aquatic species, and was a juvenile when it died. A malformation caused it to develop with two necks and skulls, a growth abnormality called axial bifurcation. The is the first example of a two-headed fossil.

Axial bifurcation is known to occur in many reptile, though it is rare.  About 400 instances of two-headed snakes have been recorded, according to Dr. Eric Buffetaut, a lead researcher of the fossil. Two-headed turtles are also reported on occasion.

Rare as two-headed specimens are, it's remarkable that one was fossilized.  Fossilization is relatively rare in and of itself, since organisms are apt to decay quickly once they die.  An organism needs to be buried quickly, freeze, or be enveloped in some type of oxygen-free environment.

So what are the odds of finding two-headed dinos?  Pretty slim.  At this rate we might even find a missing link.

Image courtesy the Royal Society.

Creation-Evolution Headlines has an update to the dinosaur soft tissue controversy. In case you're unfamiliar with the subject, read about Dr. Mary Schweitzer's discovery of soft tissue inside a "65 million-year-old" Tyrannosaurus rex femur at this post.

The update is a Science magazine report of a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, at which Schweitzer (who accepts the old age of the fossil) defended her claims of soft dinosaur tissue discovery. One skeptic in particular named Thomas Kaye also found blood vessel-like structures in dinosaur fossils he examined, but suggested they were formed by microbes that moved into the fossils more recently. The Creation-Evolution Headlines editor provides a list of helpful questions that can be used to test Kaye's theory.

So sad I missed this one from last week: Dolphin With Four Fins May Prove Terrestrial Origins. A dolphin was discovered off the coast of Japan with two additional fins near its tail, a previously unknown phenomenon that Scott Baker of Oregon State University calls "direct evidence of evolution." The proposition is obviously that these back fins once served as legs, making this odd dolphin a sort of missing link between land and marine mammals. Tokyo scientist Seiji Osumi declared, "I believe the fins may be remains from a time when dolphins' ancient ancestors lived on land." National Geographic News calls it an "evolutionary throwback." Could someone explain to me in genetic terms what an "evolutionary throwback" is? Is there any genetic evidence that our ancestral state is somehow preserved in our DNA, and can be occasionally manifested?
This reminds me of the sad story about the retarded Turks who walk on all fours. Although, in this case, the misfit dolphin may be an entirely new species, not simply a genetic malfunction. If so, a creationist would look for hydrodynamic function in the extra set of fins. As opposed to mud-moving function.

Armchair archaeologists are using the satellite imagery of Google Earth to discover possible new dig sites. If you haven't downloaded your copy yet, by all means, get it here right now.

Lastly, the south pole of Saturn exhibits a spectacular hurricane-like storm. This brief video is courtesy of Cassini.  (At 5,000 miles across, Larry Vardiman at ICR would probably say it better resembles a hypercane. The largest earth hurricane in modern history was Hurricane Tip, measuring at 1,350 miles.)