Man finds fossils in front yard that he believes are from Noah's flood, evolution denying fossil "expert" confirms it without actually seeing the evidence. Go ahead guess which state this is.

Courtesy of CBS 19: 

One East Texas man believes he found fossils from Noah’s flood and a self-proclaimed fossil expert says he's right. 

“From Noah’s flood to my front yard, how much better can it get,” Wayne Propst said. 

Propst is stunned. He was helping his aunt lay some dirt outside her home in Tyler when he found this. 

“What's really interesting to me is we're talking about the largest catastrophe known to man, the flood that engulfed the entire world,” Propst said. 

He called up self-proclaimed fossil expert Joe Taylor who confirmed that what Propst found is in fact from the time of Noah’s ark and he says finding those fossils in Tyler is rare.

Did you guess Texas? Because seriously you should always guess Texas, with Florida as your back up.

By the way this is what it says on this "fossil experts" website:

I’m Joe Taylor, the director and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. If you like fossils, dinosaur digs and other old things you have come to the right place. Check the news reports. We want to show you why we do not believe that the evolution theory or the millions of years concept is good science.

Well it's a good thing he keeps an open mind, don't you think?

"Hey if you want to hear some complete bullshit about fossils, from a guy who hates actual science, then give me call. Reinforcement of your superstitious beliefs guaranteed."

This is what this Propst guy's aunt had to say about the "discovery":

“To think that like he says that we have something in our yard that dated back to when God destroyed the earth. I mean, how much better could anything be,” Givan said.

And at the end of the video on the CBS 19 website Propst himself makes this comment:

"Who else can say they have a front yard full of Noah's dirt?" 

Look I know that Texans get really snippy with me for pointing out all of the morons living in their state, but come on! How could I resist this story?

New earth Creationist finds fossils dating back 60 million years. Doesn't change his mind one little bit.

Courtesy of Calgary Sun:  

His name is Edgar Nernberg, and when he’s not sitting on the board of directors of Big Valley’s Creationist Museum or actively lobbying for the inclusion of creationism in Alberta’s school curriculum, Nernberg operates a backhoe in Calgary. 

It was in the seat of that machine that Nernberg made the discovery being hailed by scientists in Alberta as one of the most important fossil finds in decades, helping to solve an evolutionary puzzle dating back 60 million years. 

Not that Nernberg is buying that date for a second: To him, the five perfectly preserved fossil fish, found while excavating a basement in northwest Calgary, are just more proof of a world created by God only a few thousand years ago. 

“No, it hasn’t changed my mind. We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,” says Nernberg.

In response to the evidence that disputes his claim that the earth is only about 6,000 years old Nernberg had this to say:

“There’s no dates stamped on these thing."

And that my friends is why there is no arguing with people like this. 

And the frightening part is that the museum that this guy contributes to, and others all around the world like it, are actively teaching young children lies in order to protect their religious faith from being undermined by actual scientific evidence.

It appears that another gap in the fossil record has been filled.

Courtesy of CBC News:  

How did fish evolve into four-legged beasts that roam the land? A key part of that mystery has been solved by fossils found on a Nova Scotia beach. 

Tetrapods, named for their four limbs, are fish-like amphibians that made the transition from the sea to the land about 370 million years ago. A 30-million-year gap in the fossil record of tetrapod evolution has puzzled scientists since the 1950s, says Jason Anderson, associate professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of Calgary. 

But tetrapod fossils found at Blue Beach, located on the Avon River estuary on the Bay of Fundy near Wolfville, N.S., suggest the gap may have been an illusion. The findings were published in a new paper published in PLOS ONE by Anderson and Canadian and British colleagues. 

Tetrapods first developed flipper-like limbs and started crawling out of the water about 370 million years ago, Anderson told CBC's Quirks & Quarks. At that time, they were quite large, about the size of a person, and very fish-like, with tail fins and internal gills. They also had variable numbers of fingers and toes — "up to eight," Anderson said in an interview that airs Saturday.

Anderson also suggests that the so-called "gap" in the fossil record may not exist at all.  

"This gap itself isn't really a thing," he said. "It's just the result of a poor fossil record and the difficulty of finding rocks from this particular time."

Of course as we know these so-called "gaps" are what Creationists use to undermine the veracity of evolutionary science, so it is important to remind the public that the fossil record is becoming more complete all of the time, and to stress that it is unnecessary to see every single piece of the puzzle in order to identify what is being revealed by the ones that we have already found.

And do I even need to mention the stunning hypocrisy of demanding that evolution be 100% verifiable while refusing even the most basic scientific scrutiny of the religious belief which drives their doubt.?

Excellent video to show that Evolutionary science denier in the family.

As you already know by now it absolutely drives me crazy that people who don't understand the teaching of Evolution, or simply despise it because it challenges the biblical story of creation, are constantly attacking science in our public school classrooms.

I think that this video does a rather exemplary job of pointing out all of the science that supports Evolution, as well as presenting the intermediary fossils which Creationists are always claiming simply do not exist. 

Definitely a good video to bookmark for that next holiday when old Uncle Jack starts pontificating on the "fact" that even scientists can't agree on Evolution, or that because they cannot point to a first cause the whole scientific discipline needs to be thrown out.

Fresh from raging at Neil deGrasse Tyson over the new "Cosmos" series, Creationists turn their attention to a new, and potentially more unsettling, science based program.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

We all know the Darwin fish, the car-bumper send-up of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har. 

But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in water, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us. 

Sure enough, in 2004, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million-year-old Devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal." 

"It has a neck," says Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. "No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist." Tiktaalik, Shubin has observed, was a fish capable of doing a push-up. It had both lungs and gills. In sum, it's quite the transitional form. 

Shubin's bestselling book about his discovery, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, uses the example of Tiktaalik and other evolutionary evidence to trace how our own bodies share similar structures not only with close relatives like chimpanzees or orangutans, but indeed, with far more distant relatives like fish. Think of it as an extensive unpacking of a famous line by Charles Darwin from his book, The Descent of Man: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

The PBS series based on Neil Shubin's incredible work is due to premiere Wednesday. So of course it has irritated the proponents of Intelligent Design/Creationists.

As some of you may know Creationists love to harp on the gap in the fossil record as proof that Evolution does not prove that man evolved over time from more primitive life forms.

To be honest it has always confused me as they choose to completely ignore the overwhelming evidence in the fossils we HAVE uncovered, and focus instead on the ones that they believe are still missing. Kind of like if you were putting a jigsaw puzzle of a jaguar together, and though the assembled pieces clearly show that it is in fact a jaguar, because there are one or two missing pieces certain people refuse to see it.

That is why this discovery is especially consternating to the Creationists, as it adds yet another important piece to the puzzle.

So of course it must be refuted.

Courtesy of Raw Story:

Prominent creationist Elizabeth Mitchell reviewed the show for Answers In Genesis, and she was unimpressed by the manner in which Shubin allegedly “juxtaposes factual human anatomy with tiresome tales that misleadingly suggest [his] evolutionary interpretations superimposed on the fossils, genetics, embryology, and anatomy in the episode are as trustworthy as the observational science.” 

The common design of of Tiktaalik limbs and human hands “is consistent with the biblical account,” she wrote. “It only makes sense that a wise Creator, the Common Designer of all living things, would use this versatile, stable skeletal pattern in countless different kinds of creatures.” 

Mitchell then tackled Shubin’s claim that the location of the male reproductive organ on the outside in humans is evidence is another indication that “flaws in the human body, like our susceptibility to hernias, remind us that we’re all adapted from ancient ancestors; we are, every one of us, just a jury-rigged fish.” 

She found “several problems with that statement,” foremost among them — that it contradicted the Bible. “God designed a perfect human body along with a perfect world in the beginning,” she wrote.

Part of my problem with the Creationists, besides the fact that they insist that every question as yet unanswered by science proves the existence of God, is their contention that we were created perfect.

This idea of perfection, is decidedly imperfect.

For instance as human beings our olfactory nerves are pathetic as compared to many of our fellow mammals, our eyesight is a joke, our physical strength would put us quite near the bottom of the food chain if our brains did not compensate so well, and our bodies are fragile machines prone to malfunction, disease, and an expiration date after only about 75 years or so.

There is nothing perfect about us.

In fact as most evolutionary biologists know, we are a transitional lifeform ourselves, as are all creatures on the planet.

And recognizing that fact means that learning we have evolved from apes, fish, or ultimately single cell creatures, should not be seen as an insult, but rather an amazing accomplishment.

Unlike religion, science does not define mankind as a fallen race, in need of salvation from a micro managing sky daddy, but rather a miracle of evolution for whom the journey toward the eventual  destination of our species is really only just beginning.

Third grader writes to lawmakers asking that they make the Wooly Mammoth the state fossil. Creationist Senator refuses to allow it unless he can put in Bible reference. However it looks like the bill will approved without such superst....oh wait.

Courtesy of the Friendly Atheist:

Earlier this year, a third grader wrote to her state representatives asking them to make the Wooly Mammoth South Carolina’s official state fossil. 

After a couple of holdups, it looked like there were no objections and the bill would go through… but the version of the bill that looks like it’ll be signed into law contains a ridiculous amendment: 

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina: 

SECTION 1. Article 9, Chapter 1, Title 1 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding: 

“Section 1-1-712A. The Columbian Mammoth, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field, is designated as the official State Fossil of South Carolina and must be officially referred to as the ‘Columbian Mammoth’, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field.” 

That untrue, unscientific, twice-mentioned Creationist addition is the work of Sen. Kevin Bryant (a Republican, of course) who derailed the bill from the outset by trying to stick a full Bible passage in it. While that amendment was thrown out, this one somehow was accepted.

Gee look. Now South Carolina can now celebrate scientific discoveries while still adhering to antiquated superstitions.

It's like a retarded potpourri. 

Gee, I wonder how this guy votes?

Either he doesn't understand the definition of "Evolution," or he doesn't understand the definition for "Fairy Tales."

Somebody might also want to let him know that they sell a thing called bumper stickers.

I'm just saying.