Articles » Zoology

You don’t have to travel to Africa to see beautiful creatures. Certainly Africa has amazing biodiversity. One of our daughters travelled to an east African country this past summer. In a nearby National Wildlife Park she saw zebras, lions, elephants, hippos, gazelles, giraffes, wildebeest and crocodiles. And she managed to take some spectacular pictures.

The rest of us might well declare that since we cannot go to a beautiful African wildlife park anytime soon, we are excused from conducting observations in the great outdoors. That however definitely is not the case. Even city dwellers can manage to view some wonderful wildlife nearby. Read the rest of this entry »

A careful examination of objects by both telescopes and microscopes reveals a major contrast between human-constructed objects and those designed by the Creator.  Human made objects, such as a watch, reveal more imperfections as the magnification by which they are viewed is increased.  An old-fashioned gear watch is an object of beauty when viewed by the naked eye.  Under the microscope, though, the flaws in the machining process become more apparent until, under high power, a watch looks not only imperfect, but crude.

In contrast, increasing magnification of the natural world reveals new detail and perfection.  Read the rest of this entry »

Pangolins are some of the strangest animals you will likely ever see. They are covered with scales like reptiles and look like a cross between anteaters and armadillos (Kierst, 2013). Because they are like no other animal, they were put in their own taxonomic order called Pholidota, Greek for “horny scale” (Benton, 2005, p. 348). Their tough, overlapping, reptile-protective keratin scales cause it to look like a giant pinecone with a long, thin reptilian tail. Its profile looks very much like a miniature dinosaur and nothing like the mammal it is. It is a mammal because they give birth to live young that suckle mammary glands  as infants (Johnson, 2001, p. 31).

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Friday and Saturday – October 25 and 26, 2019

Featuring Dr. Margaret Helder

• Original research in algae, aquatic fungi and freshwater ecology
• Taught biology to university and high school levels, and home school science workshops for all grades
• Science writer for Dialogue and Reformed Perspective and other Christian publications
• Expert witness at a trial on creation/evolution in the United States Read the rest of this entry »

A friend, a while ago, articulated some possible critical arguments concerning advocacy for young earth creation which are based on observations from nature. Here are some reflections on that conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Hippopotamus, called hippos, are monstrous, mostly herbivorous, semiaquatic mammals native to most of Africa. Only in the Sahara Desert are they not found. Their origins have always been a problem for evolution because they  are like no other living animal. Only two extant species exist, the Nile hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius), and the pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropisi liberiensis). During the daytime they are aquatic, floating in the water world, and at the nighttime they are land animals consuming mostly grasses, soft plants, and some succulent fruit. (Macdonald,1987, p. 507) They were named from the Greek words for river horse. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone likes to communicate, to share what we have learned. And there is so much to learn!! While we all enjoy sharing our latest news with friends, sometimes this news involves events or objects observed in nature. Did you hear about the bear that so and so saw in their back yard?! Naturally you want to be the first to report this interesting piece of information. But as we get a little older, sometimes it is fun to make a study of an issue and be the first to report our findings to our friends.  Nature is so full of interesting features and processes and events. Have you ever asked yourself, what is happening here and why is it happening? Read the rest of this entry »

Aardvarks (Aard-Vark, Dutch for “earth-pig”), are one-of-a-kind animals, one of the strangest mammals you will ever encounter. They have a body like a large rat, a long snout like an ant eater, a pig nose, long ears like a rabbit, pink skin with coarse hair like a pig (but in contrast to pigs, aardvarks have very thick skin and lack a fat layer), short legs, feet like a pig and a long thin tail that resembles a kangaroo’s tail (Hutchins, 2004, p. 155). Their barrel-shaped body weighs between 100 and 180 pounds (50 to 83 kg). The greatly elongated head-snout is set on a short thick neck. The tail is thick at the base and gradually tapers. So strange was it that, when described to European naturalists, many doubted its reality (Catchpoole, 2014, p. 28). Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Gordon Wilson’s presentations at Creation Weekend 2018 were extremely well received. The first lecture dealt with natural evil. Mankind has long pondered why our beautiful creation is so full of cruelty and death. Indeed our ecology as it is now, runs on death. And many creatures survive entirely by consuming other creatures. The big question, Dr. Gordon Wilson declared, is how this situation came to be since God created everything in an unfallen state, all of it very good. Moreover, Scripture tells us that there was no physical death, animal or human, before the fall. All animals were vegetarian. Read the rest of this entry »

Creation Weekend 2018 October 26 & 27

The Creation Science Association of Alberta is excited that our featured speaker for Creation Weekend 2018 is Dr. Gordon Wilson of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. Dr. Wilson’s enthusiasm for biology is infectious and the topics which he will present are ones that are very relevant to our lives as Christians today.

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My husband and I recently visited the Philip J. Currie Museum at Wembley in northwestern Alberta. The rationale for building this beautiful new facility was the Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed at nearby Pipestone Creek. This horned dinosaur is very interesting, known from bonebeds in Alberta and the north slope of Alaska. The museum did not display a model of the highly concentrated bone bed (up to 200 bones per square metre), nor a skeleton of Pachyrhinosaurus, nor a model of the creature (that I saw). They did however display different sizes of one kind of arm bone to illustrate that animals of all ages were overtaken by the same watery catastrophe. Read the rest of this entry »

Landmark Work: What’s Wrong with ‘Survival of the Fittest’

An exciting new book was published in the fall of 2017. The author, Nathaniel Jeanson, is a specialist in molecular biology and bioinformatics with a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Harvard University. With such fancy credentials, one might expect his new book to be very difficult and full of technical mumbo-jumbo! Well, Dr. Jeanson does present some very interesting information, but he does undertake to make the discussion accessible to interested readers. Excellent illustrations (some in colour) really help. Nevertheless for reading this book a good background in high school biology at least would be a big help. Read the rest of this entry »

People who live in rural regions obviously have an enormous advantage in opportunities to observe and enjoy nature. For a start, they may be able to view the night sky much better than their friends in the city whose view of the stars is dimmed by city lights. Secondly of course there are the animals who make a point of visiting the property. There may be waterfowl in the spring, ducks and geese at least, who come to refresh themselves on your pond. And how about the frogs who deafen the night with their cheerful choruses. Read the rest of this entry »

The African elephant is the largest living terrestrial mammal, even larger than most dinosaurs. Its mammoth size means their primary enemy is humans, not the major carnivores, such as lions, that inhabit its homeland. The largest recorded African elephant reached 12 feet (four meters) at the shoulder and weighed over ten tons. Called “nature’s masterpiece” and “skilled engineers” elephants are one of “the most intelligent of domesticated animals.” (Redmond, 1993, p. 6). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2017 award of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine to three Americans, Michael Rosbash, Jeffrey Hall and Michael Young, has served to stimulate our interest in a phenomenon that is actually well-known. We all know why people get hungry about the same time of day, or wake up about the same time, or suffer from jet-lag. It is because of biological clocks. So what was so special about the work of these three scientists? The story actually goes back to 1729! Read the rest of this entry »