Günter Bechly

Archives

#2 Story of 2020: Kimberella Is No Solution to the Cambrian Conundrum

_{Günter Bechly
December 31, 2020}

None of the Cambrian animal phyla is represented in the Ediacaran fossil record.

Kimberella Is No Solution to the Cambrian Conundrum

_{Günter Bechly
September 21, 2020}

The fossil record speaks clearly and cries out loud: the history of life on Earth is a history of saltations.

Kimberella and Controversial Relationships — A Chronological Synopsis, Continued

_{Günter Bechly
September 19, 2020}

One researchers has preferred to classify Kimberella among the Ediacaran "fossil problematica.”

Kimberella and Controversial Relationships — A Chronological Synopsis

_{Günter Bechly
September 18, 2020}

It is remarkable, indeed, how detailed a medusoid morphology was projected onto Kimberella fossils and later recognized as pure fantasy.

Kimberella — The Oldest Radula (Not)

_{Günter Bechly
September 17, 2020}

There is a strange fact that shows that any interpretation of these trace fossils has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Kimberella — Locomotory Tracks

_{Günter Bechly
September 16, 2020}

But what about tracks of the moving animal? There are indeed some fossils from the White Sea.

Kimberella — Traces and a Trace-maker

_{Günter Bechly
September 15, 2020}

The body fossils are generally positioned at the focal points of the fan-shaped scratch marks.

Kimberella — Controversial Scratch Marks

_{Günter Bechly
September 14, 2020}

A former teacher of mine was the late Adolf Seilacher, who was a leading authority on trace fossils and who for obvious reasons preferred to be called "Dolf."

Reconstructing Kimberella — The Disputed Anatomy in Detail

_{Günter Bechly
September 12, 2020}

Fossils often leave much room for very different interpretations of relatively poor evidence.

Kimberella — Four Phases of Interpretation

_{Günter Bechly
September 11, 2020}

In the quite checkered history of the detailed reconstruction of Kimberella, we can distinguish four distinct successive phases.

A Paleontologist on Why the “Cambrian Explosion” Label Persists

_{Günter Bechly
April 23, 2018}

On this episode of ID the Future, Sarah Chaffee interviews German paleo-entomologist Günter Bechly on the Cambrian explosion, the relatively sudden appearance of new body plans in the fossil record an estimated 550 million years ago. Dr. Bechly explains how the Cambrian explosion has been challenged by non-experts with an anti-ID bias, yet remains very much a real event in the opinion of specialists in the field — and with the continuing failure of Darwinian explanations, a strong source of evidential support for intelligent design.

Günter Bechly on Fossils and Common Descent, Pt 2

_{Günter Bechly
February 26, 2018}

German paleontologist Günter Bechly was co-author (with Stephen C. Meyer) of the chapter titled The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry, in the major new book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. In this second conversation with Sarah Chaffee on this topic, Bechly speaks of “life’s second ‘big bang,'” one of many discontinuities in the fossil record. “There’s no reasonable way,” he concludes, “to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.”

Günter Bechly on Fossils and Common Descent, Pt 1

_{Günter Bechly
February 19, 2018}

Sarah Chaffee interviews German paleontologist Günter Bechly on the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, specifically his chapter with Stephen Meyer on The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry. Bechly, who had been a prominent proponent of Darwinism, discovered late in his career that there are significant scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary story. His chapter in the book describes some of these reasons.

Another New Discovery Disrupts Human Evolution Account

_{Günter Bechly
February 12, 2018}

On this episode of ID the Future, German paleontologist Günter Bechly describes the Dali skull from China, and how it disrupts the conventional out-of-Africa account of human origins. There were already several significant discoveries in 2017 upending traditional scientific accounts of human evolution. And now another one. Bechly asks, “How many more major rewritings do we need to endure until a major rethinking is considered?” For more, read the essay on Evolution News.

Wikipedia Throws Günter Bechly Down the Orwellian Memory Hole

_{Günter Bechly
November 27, 2017}

On this episode of ID The Future, Robert Crowther talks with paleontologist Dr. Günter Bechly about his entry on Wikipedia which was created in 2012 and suspiciously disappeared in 2015 when he started supporting Intelligent Design. An eminent paleontologist, Bechly was curator of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and had numerous species as well as even a family named after him, a high honor in the field. Crowther and Bechly go over the specious reasons given by Wikipedia for Bechly’s deletion, revealing the ideological and authoritarian nature of some the editors at Wikipedia.