Todd's Blog

What a year!   The Core Academy mission is to nurture the next generation of faithful, Christ-like creation researchers to explore the hardest problems in creation.  We accomplish this through workshops and retreats, outreach events, and the Sanders Scholarship program.  At this time of year, I'm already busily planning out next year's ministry work, but it's also important to stop and look back at our accomplishments in 2019.  There are three big ones that I am very thankful for. First, in February, my book The Fool and the Heretic , written with Darrel Falk and Rob Barrett, was released from Zondervan.  This book was born out of years of discussion with Darrel.  It was a difficult book to write, and a difficult book to read.  Reviews have ranged from unqualified praise to skepticism to outright condemnation.  From both creationists and evolutionists, I've heard the same refrain: "Of course, being kind and loving is important, but the truth is more important.

There's a new fossil paper in Nature that's grabbing some headlines, and frankly, it's an odd one.  I'm going to give a few semi-technical thoughts here, and I might write a more general post for Human Genesis some other time (or I might not. Always in motion is the future.).  This post is mostly my gut reaction after reading the paper. In the paper, the authors Böhme et al. describe a group of fossils found in Bavaria, about an hour's drive west of Munich.  Paleomagnetic dating indicate a conventional date of about 11.6 million years ago, making this a Miocene deposit.  The fossils are similar to a group we already knew about: the dryopithecin apes.  What these new fossils do for us is give us a bit more information about the skeletons of these apes.  They call this new fossil ape Danuvius . Based on the fragmentary remains, we make some really interesting observations about the anatomy of  Danuvius .  These apes had strongly opposed big toes, which would a

I've started making short videos explaining some of the fossil replicas and models in the Core Academy collection.  Here are the first batch: Kabwe, Nariokotome, and La Chapelle.  I'll probably shoot at least one more over Thanksgiving break.  Let me know if you have a favorite hominin fossil or topic you'd like me to talk about.  Don't look at me like that.  Everyone has a favorite hominin fossil.  (Radiometric dating of the fossils has already been requested.) Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!