The animal that does not die

 

The animal that does not die?  Are we in the messianic age? More stories about Israel.

A Lazarus monkey has been found in the Congo

 

The newly recognised monkey species Colobus congoensis. Image courtesy of Daniel Rosengren

Joel Kontinen

A new Lazarus animal, black colobus monkey from a remote part of the Congo Basin rainforest, is thought to be severely threatened by poaching.

The monkey is known as Likweli to local people who hunt it for bushmeat, and it has been given the scientific name Colobus congoensis. It lives in one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa, without paved roads or infrastructure. This monkey is relative to other Asian colobine monkeys.

 “A typical expedition involves multiple modes of transportation: a flight, followed by a motorcycle ride, two days of hiking on foot and finally travel by dugout canoe to reach the monkey’s range,” says Kate Detwiler at Florida Atlantic University.

Detwiler and her colleagues believe the species’ mask-like face may represent ancestral traits that were present before the African and Asian colobine lineages diverged over 8 million years ago. according to evolution, “If so, likweli may have retained characteristics that were subsequently modified or lost in the other African colobus species,” says Detwiler.

Scientists first became aware of the species in 2008 when a team surveying on the banks of the Lomami river, in what is now Lomami National Park, took a photo that showed only a part of a monkey that had not been seen before, high in the canopy.

Then, in November 2018, another group again spotted the monkey, which is about 1.3 metres long and weighs around 7 kilograms. Between 2018 and 2022, there were 114 recorded observations of the new species, 25 of which were from vocalisations.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Congolese monkey with mask-like face and strong BO is new to science | New Scientist 15 July

 

The Dinosaur Extinction Was More Complicated Than You Think

 

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. According to Genesis it happened during the time of Noah. It did not kill all the dinosaurs, as the account in Job tells us.  

Dinosaurs are the biggest creatures to have ever walked on land, dominating Earth for over 130 million years according to evolution. But how could such extraordinary creatures have simply vanished in the blink of a geological eye? For decades, we’ve assumed these prehistoric megafauna – a staple of our childhoods and Hollywood movies – went extinct for one simple reason: the asteroid that hit Earth was so unimaginably large that it changed everything in one single blow. But now, thanks to new research, an even more intriguing idea has emerged: size alone doesn’t explain what happened.

The real reason the impact was so devastating may have been its angle. Had the asteroid arrived a according Earth at the time, predominantly dinosaurs on land, marine creatures in the sea and pterosaurs in the air, it appears to have struck at almost the worst possible angle imaginable, launching vast quantities of rock, dust and climate-altering gases high into the atmosphere and triggering one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Source:

David Stock 2026  The Dinosaur Extinction Was More Complicated Than You Think | New Scientist July 16

How humans evolved to be twice as big as our ancestors

 

Image courtesy of Chuang Zhao.

Joel Kontinen

Artistic representations of ancient humans often show large men with bulging muscles – but our ancestors were actually smaller than us, in both height and body mass.

When we look at our evolutionary ancestors, we are twice as big as they were.  But there is one thing that about this – evolution does not make us bigger, but we are comparing us to beings that are smaller than us. They are only what evolutionist call ape men.

An article in New Scientist tells this about man and our evolution.

As someone who writes a lot about human evolution and archaeology, I’ve seen a great many artists’ impressions of prehistoric people. Some are remarkably believable, closely tied to scientific findings as much as possible. Others, not so much. I twitch every time I see a reconstruction of an African or tropical hominin with northern-European-style pale skin, and the twitches escalate whenever I see hairless hominins wandering around naked in temperate regions like Britain. Put something on or you’ll die.

Source:

By Michael Marshall 2026 How humans evolved to be twice as big as our ancestors | New Scientist 13 July 

Sugar molecules found in interstellar space for the first time

 

Image courtesy of NASA, JPL-Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC/ Caltech) et al.

Joel Kontinen

Researches have found sugar molecules in a cosmic cloud nearly  27light i yeas from us, The ones who believe in panspermia or that life could arise on other planets, suppose that asteroids brought them to earth.

Sugar molecules have been found in interstellar space for the first time. The finding adds further evidence to the idea that early life on Earth may have benefited from complex sugar molecules arriving from elsewhere.

Sugars arise from chemical bonds among carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Besides serving as an energy source, certain sugars are fundamental building blocks of RNA and DNA, the genetic material found in every living cell. However, there has long been a chicken-and-egg problem: living organisms make sugars with enzymes, but experiments recreating conditions on pre-life Earth have yielded relatively few.

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Sugar molecules found in interstellar space for the first time | New Scientist13 July 

  

Global warming already causing crop losses of over $20 billion a year

 

Image courtesy of  Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Evolution and global warming are the trends we have been forced to look at,  but this has not been present in Finland.  

Global warning -fuelled heat and drought is already hitting yields of maize, wheat and soybeans to the tune of $20 billion a year, a study has estimated.

There is great uncertainty about these kinds of projections, not least because so much depends on how farmers respond and adapt to a continually changing climate, for instance, by switching to different crops or adopting irrigation where it is possible. In fact, the whole point of this study is to raise awareness and encourage adaptation, to help ensure these projections turn out to be overestimates, says team member Kai Kornhuber, also at IIASA. “This is the entire mission of climate scientists: we make these cases for people to react, so our projections turn out to be wrong.”

The researchers started by gathering data on the yields per country of maize, wheat and soya from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Next, they took past climate data and calculated the drought level, using a standard approach that estimates soil moisture levels from rainfall and evaporation levels.

The researchers then calculated the economic losses, based on FAO data showing how much farmers would have been paid for their produce at the time. Finally, they used the same approach to project future losses in several different emissions scenarios, assuming that some adaptation takes place.

This could be an underestimate of the full impact of climate change for a number of reasons: it’s just three crops, and it doesn’t include flood, storm or rain damage, or the possibility that shortages could lead to big price increases, as is already happening with some other crops such as coffee and cacao.

Source:

 Michael Le Page  2026 Global warming already causing crop losses of over $20 billion a year | New Scientist 10 July

Fossil fruits sand flowering plants flourished in time of dinosaurs

 

Image courtesy of Brian Engh

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, dinosaurs now lived  with flowering plants. This is new, as the standard view of din9saurs was that they only eat each other or some form of cones,

.“Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics says the study is the first time he has  seen “wanting” and “liking” disentangled in a bee."

“We underestimate insects so much,” he says. “It’s led to a golden age of very charming studies where scientists use modern techniques – sometimes just high-resolution, high-frame-rate video, as in this study – to reveal behaviours people have been missing.”

A wide variety of fruits and seeds that were smothered in the ash from a volcanic eruption nearly 75 million years ago suggest flowering plants were diverse and thriving in the time of the dinosaurs, far earlier than previously known.

Researchers had thought the emergence of large seeds and fruits followed the end-Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, and was tied to the rise of mammals and birds.

“Now, we have evidence that large fruit and seeds and the related ecological conditions can be traced back to 10 million years before the asteroid impact that according to evolution wiped out the dinosaurs,” says Jaemin Lee at the University of California, Berkeley.

The team discovered an extraordinary 77 different kinds of fruits and seeds. Such a ready banquet of nutritious fruit would almost certainly have been eaten by herbivorous dinosaurs and other animals.The first flowering plants emerge in the fossil record 136 million years ago, but, until now, it was thought early forms were mostly small and weedy and vastly different to the range of species that dominate Earth’s forests today.

In Cretaceous deposits elsewhere, the fruit and seeds are roughly the size of a poppy seed on average – far smaller than the blueberry-sized seeds at Jose Creek.

Yes, according to Genesis, flowers and animals were created at the same time.  

Source:

James Woodforg 2026 Fossil fruits show flowering plants flourished in time of dinosaurs | New Scientist 25 June