Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the weird critter Hallucigenia from the Cambrian Burgess Shale, as we discuss the most recent contribution to the Cambrian Explosion bingo game, which is how I prefer to call the popular exercise in wild speculation and unsubstantiated guesswork among evolutionary biologists to explain the abrupt appearance of animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion about 535-515 million years ago. Among the many different causes that have been proposed as alleged drivers of the Cambrian Explosion, an

This Fossil Friday features the SEM image of a microscopic fossil from the Silurian of Gotland in Sweden. It belongs to a fascinating but enigmatic group of extinct marine organisms called Chitinozoa, which thrived in 56 known genera from the Early Ordovician to the Latest Devonian period, roughly 485 to 359 million years ago. They were first described by Eisenack (1931), who initially considered them as single-celled organisms related to testate amoebae but just a year later changed his mind.

This Fossil Friday discusses Quaestio simpsonorum from the Late Precambrian of the Ediacaran biota in Australia, which is, well, actually I have no idea what it really is, and neither does anyone else, which makes its genus name very fitting indeed. Here is the backstory of these fossils that were discovered in the 555-million-year-old sandstones of Nilpena Ediacara National Park in the South Australian outback, and were reconstructed as inflated disc-shaped organisms that were floating over microbial mats on the ancient seafloor like a Roomba.

Recently I had the great privilege and honor to attend a remarkable event in the beautiful and historic city of Venice, Italy. It was the first pan-European conference on intelligent design theory, organized by the Centro Italiano Intelligent Design (CIID), in collaboration with the foundation En Arche (Poland), BioCosmos (Norway),

This Fossil Friday features the reconstruction drawing of Strashila incredibilis, an extremely weird fossil insect from the Late Jurassic of Siberia. It was first described by Rasnitsyn (1992)

The case of Professor William Amos represents an interesting parallel with dissenters in the intelligent design community.

This Fossil Friday features the enigmatic Permian fossil Helicoprion bessonovi, which certainly ranks among the strangest creatures ever to haunt the prehistoric seas. It is an extinct genus of giant cartilaginous fish whose fossils have baffled scientists for over a century. Known primarily from a single bizarre type of structure — the “tooth whorl” — this creature’s evolutionary relationships, biology, and even basic anatomy have been hotly debated. The saga of

Few hypotheses in evolutionary biology have become as popular among lay people as the postulated ancestry of birds from bipedal dinosaurs.

This notorious discontinuity in the fossil record did not get any smaller with 160 years of research since Darwin, but instead became more and more acute.

How do popularizers of Darwinism such as Richard Dawkins react? Unsurprisingly, they just ignore the evidence.