Spectacular feathered dinosaur fossil shows bird-like adaptations

 

Image courtesy of Andrea Cau et al., Nature Communications (2026)

Joel Kontinen

The 57-centimetre-long fossil is between 100 million and 145 million years old, and was discovered by a farmer near the town of Lamadong in Liaoning, China.

Some Darwinist sat  that a bird like dinosaur was found in China,  it was was donated to a museum at Hebei GEO University in 2023, where Ji Qiang and his colleagues examined the exquisitely preserved specimen, complete with plumage, teeth, wings and articulated spine.

he researchers determined that the dinosaur was a new species, which they named Norellraptor barsboldi in honour of palaeontologists Mark Allen Norell and Rinchen Barsbold. It belongs in a group of small dinosaurs with both feathers and wings known as microraptorines.

Based on evolutionary relationships, the researchers found that around 30 per cent of anatomical changes in microraptorines also evolved in the bird lineage, but in a different order, providing evidence that the two groups evolved flight separately and for different reasons.

Analyses of N. barsboldi’s bone microstructure, its growth patterns and its evolutionary relationships show that the evolutionary sequences leading to flight adaptations in living birds and in bird-like dinosaurs were quite different, says Jacqueline  Nguyen.

This survey does not say that dinosaurs and birds are relatives.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Spectacular feathered dinosaur fossil shows bird-like adaptations | New Scientist 29 September 

Why is this monster El Niño so strong?

 

Image courtesy of CSU/CIRA & JMA/JAXA

Joel Kontinen

Some researchers are thinking why is the el Niño so powerful this autumn, although the time for it is gone.   

Many who spoke a lot about evolution are now talking about global warming.

Mind-blowing. Unprecedented. Off the charts. Jaw-dropping. Godzilla-level. Superlatives have been flying about the current El Niño climate pattern, which is already the strongest on record months before it is expected to peak – and unusually, they are coming from scientists, rather than the media. So, what has made this such an exceptional event?

This will no doubt be the subject of many studies to come, but the broad picture is clear. Two main factors have driven the formation of this record-smashing El Niño, the first of which was set in motion long before it began.

Source:

Michael Le Page 2026 Why is this monster El Niño so strong? | New Scientist 28 September 

Milei rips apart the UN:s anti-Israel circus

 

The Argentinian president Javier Milei rips apart the UN:s anti-Israel circus.

Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet

 

Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet

Image courtesy of Guilhem Duvot, SUAQ Project

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution,  orangutans  are almost human,  so they are able to copy some of the traits of humans and from other apes. But animal intelligence is not something we would smirk at. Some birds are intelligent than apes. 

Young orangutans acquire a substantial body of knowledge before they can survive independently, which they must do by the time they are 8.5 years old. This includes understanding what foods are safe to eat, where to fi intelligrent than apes. nd them and how to process them in a rainforest offering hundreds of food options of varying levels of accessibility – from easy-to-access leaves to the more inaccessible but also manimal ore nutritious seeds at the heart of a tough, spiny neesia fruit.

The findings suggest that orangutans have different strategies for developing broad survival skills, says Revathe Thillaikumar at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

Scientists already know that orangutans can acquire this knowledge both by observing their mothers and other individuals in their social circle – a process known as social learning – and by exploring entirely on their own without any input from others, which is known as individual learning. But how these two forms of learning work together – and how they affect what orangutans learn to eat before becoming independent – hasn’t been clear.

To find out, Thillaikumar and her colleagues analysed nearly 7000 instances of learning recorded during more than 1700 hours of observations of wild Sumatran orangutans at Suaq Balimbing, a research station in Indonesia.

Youngsters who learned by watching others also tended to continue manipulating new objects or trying new foods for about 145 minutes after they had closely observed another orangutan. This activity is reminiscent of the way in which children will spend time imitating an activity they have just seen demonstrated by an adult, says Thillaikumar. “Yeah, it’s practice.”

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet | New Scientist 24 September 

Fire amoeba breaks heat tolerance record for complex life

 

Incendiamoeba cell reproducing at 63°C Image courtesy of Felix Mikus.

Joel Kontinen

Animals cam be incredible,  A species of amoeba discovered in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park can survive and thrive in temperatures that had been considered impossibly high for complex life.

Previously, according to Angela Oliverio at Syracuse University, New York, 60°C was considered the “4-minute mile” barrier for eukaryotes.

But the four minute mile has been broken.

Oliverio and her colleagues collected I. cascadensis from a small geothermal stream within California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, flowing through a “beautiful meadow” less than half a metre wide for most of its length. Temperatures in the stream range from 49°C to 65°C, with a pH range of 6 to 7.

At full stretch, I. cascadensis is, on average, about 40 micrometres long and 10 µm wide, says Oliverio.

“This is over 10 times the size of the average bacterial cell, and closer to the width of a human white blood cell,” she says. In such a hot environment, the fire amoeba is the top-order predator, feeding on thermophile bacteria, which are far more common.

Bob Leung at Monash University, Australia, says the discovery means he will have to rewrite his lectures on extremophiles.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Fire amoeba breaks heat tolerance record for complex life | New Scientist 22 September

Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged

 A 9.5-day-old mouse embryo. The front of the brain is blue and the back of the brain is red, which extends into the spinal cord.  Loh Laboratory/Stanford Medicine

Joel Kontinen

Our brain may be a hybrid of two ancient nervous systems that were packaged together hundreds of millions of years ago. This is based on the finding that the front and back brain regions in people and several other species develop from two distinct cell types in embryos, instead of sharing the same developmental origin, as previously thought..

This is based on Darwinian speculation that has no backfiring in real science.

This is what the evolutionists say of this incredible fusion;

The research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” says Kyle Loh at Stanford University. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

Loh and his colleagues studied early stages of mouse embryo development and found its brain develops from two types of early progenitor cells, proliferative cells with a limited capacity of self-renewal. One type expresses a gene called OTX2 and turns into the neurons found in the front part of the brain, comprising the forebrain and midbrain.

The hindbrain coordinates fundamental life-sustaining processes, such as breathing, sleeping, eating and the beating of the heart, .

The researchers also studied early-stage embryos of chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms, and found their nervous systems are similarly derived from two different types of progenitor cells. This suggests our shared two-origin brain system arose at least 550 million years ago.

What would, evolution do without millions of years.

Source:

Alice Klein 2026 Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged | New Scientist 18 September 

Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century

 

The tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo) in an animal refuge in La Paz, Bolivia. Image courtesy of Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionist say that animal species die all the time.  Contrast to this a tiger cat recently found in Bolivia.    

The tiger cat is one of the creatures they describe as Lazarus animals.

Tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus.

Eduardo Eizirik at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from across their known range.

L. tilcayo has a combined head and body length of between about 42 and 50 centimetres and weighs between 1.5 and 2 kilograms. The genomes revealed that it diverged from the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years ago.

Source:  

Chris Simms 2026 Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century | New Scientist 17 September