Creationist lab tech sues university, alleging wrongful dismissal

Nature : A microscopist fired from his job at California State University, Northridge, is now suing the university, claiming wrongful termination. Mark Armitage says that he lost his job because of his belief in creationism. In 2012 he unearthed a fossil triceratops horn in Montana that contained not only fossilized bone but also soft tissue. The discovery of the soft tissue led him to date the specimen as being just thousands of years old—which would place it at the time of the biblical flood—rather than the millions of years supported by most evolutionary biologists. Although he refrained from stating his views on the age of the fossil in his paper , which was published in 2013 in the journal of cell and tissue research Acta Histochemica, he says he was fired because fellow faculty members were upset that a creationist got published in a legitimate scientific journal. Specialists in US labor law say his claim of religious intolerance may not hold up in court.