The fish that crawled out of the water
A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada.
Another 'Missing Link' Found
by FSMonster 12 Replies latest social current
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FSMonster
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tetrapod.sapien
SWEET!!! i love rockin out on evolution/biology/paleo, man. it's such a heavy heady sort of subject.
AND CANADA ROCKS!
TS
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unclebruce
Slightly off topic - The study of ancient bone deposits is fascinating.
Palaeontology: the science of the forms of life existing in former geological periods as represented by fossil animals and plants.
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The Lancefield bone bed, exposed in 1975.
Located in the town of Lancefield, 10 Km north of Romsey.
It was discovered in 1843 when James Mayne, a well-digger, found giant bones from very large extinct animals now known as megafauna. Along with many other megafauna discoveries around the world at about the same time, the finding of fossils from Victoria provoked two questions that researchers are still trying to answer. What caused the extinction of these strange animals, and when did they die out?
Excavations in February 2004. The high water table at Lancefield prevented further investigation in the nineteenth century, and large-scale excavations using pumps only began in the 1970s. These excavations uncovered thousands of bones of giant kangaroos and other animals. Radiocarbon dates on charcoal found underneath the bones suggested that the bones were less than 26,000 years old. Two stone artefacts were found amongst the densely packed bones. These findings suggested that the animals died during the last ice age, 30-19,000 years ago, when the climate was cold and dry. This was well after Aboriginal people had arrived in the area, more than 40-45,000 years ago. .
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Yesterday Gumby was saying how small wombats are these days and he's right - imagine a 3 tonne wombat:
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unclebruce
FSMonster,
Sorry if I side tracked this thread. This is an amazing discovery and making news world wide. It appears that this tetrapod directly foreshadows the development of our neck, our ribs and our wrists. It seems the engine driving it's evolution was the fear of being eaten.
unclebruce
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The fish that crawled out of the water
A newly found fossil links fish to land-lubbers. Rex Dalton
The fossilized remains of Tiktaalik show a crocodile-like creature with joints in its front arms. credit Ted Daeschler
A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada.The creature, described today in Nature1,2, lived some 375 million years ago. Palaeontologists are calling the specimen from the Devonian a true 'missing link', as it helps to fill in a gap in our understanding of how fish developed legs for land mobility, before eventually evolving into modern animals including mankind.
Several samples of the fish-like tetrapod, named Tiktaalik roseae, were discovered by Edward Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago in Illinois, Farish Jenkins of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and colleagues. ===
Tetrapods did not so much conquer the land, as escape from the water. John Maisey American Museum of Natural History, New York
The crew found the samples in a river delta on Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada; these included a near-complete front half of a fossilized skeleton of a crocodile-like creature, whose skull is some 20 centimetres long.The beast has bony scales and fins, but the front fins are on their way to becoming limbs; they have the internal skeletal structure of an arm, including elbows and wrists, but with fins instead of clear fingers. The team is still looking for more complete specimens to get a better picture of hind part of the animal. ===
Plugging the Gap
The new find helps to fill a gap in the record of how fish evolved into land-loving animals. credit Kalliopi Monoyios
Creatures with features of both fish and land-living animals have been found before. Fish that may have been beginning to 'walk' in shallow water have been found from about 385 million years ago, and fish with limbs that bear digits have been seen from more than 365 million years ago.Specimens that fall into the gap, such as Tiktaalik, help researchers to work out the details of this transition. The newly found animal has a structure on its head that looks like a small gill slit that is on its way to becoming an ear, for example, and a long snout that would have been suited to catching prey on land.
"Tiktaalik substantially narrows the gap in the fossil record of the fish-tetrapod transition," says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden.
"Tiktaalik was probably an unwieldy swimmer," says John Maisey, a palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It probably lived in shallow waters, says Maisey, only hauling itself on to land temporarily to escape predators. "Tetrapods did not so much conquer the land, as escape from the water," he says. ===
Treasured find The crew picks over rocks and bones despite the dismal weather. credit Ted Daeschler
Daeschler and Shubin set off to find this missing link in the evolutionary chain back in 1999. The pair targeted Ellesmere Island after noticing that it was listed in an undergraduate textbook as exposed Devonian rock that had not previously been explored for vertebrate fossils.The desolate area was reachable only by plane, and the weather was so bad that field work could only be done for about two months each summer. The team first walked around the rocky outcrops looking for fossils of plant life that indicated stream or delta sediments, in order to target areas that had once hosted shallow waters. "That is where the action is on the fish-to-tetrapod transition," says Daeschler.
By 2000 they had found fossils with intriguing fins in the eroding rocks. "In 2004, we really scored, finding three partial skulls and numerous jaws," recalls Daeschler.
Shubin remembers finding one simply by wandering off to sit on a rock for his lunch break. "I looked over at a wall; there was a Tiktaalik snout looking out of the cliff at me. I couldn't believe my eyes. I knew the rest of the skeleton was behind it. We were high fiving right and left."
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New Worldly Translation
Very interesting.
I remember when I was a JW saying to someone who was studying paleontology at uni that there were no missing links between the species. He looked at me puzzled and said there were hundreds which surprised me.
It was then I decided to look further into the reality of evolution and not just the mis-information I'd read in the Creation book.
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heretic
'Yesterday Gumby was saying how small wombats are these days.' small.? ever tried to catch one by hand or hit one in your car unc? goodbye gearbox,sump and diff. man evolution is so obvious for aussies wombats, kangaroos, possums full on cousins so alike, and crocs are ancient.
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unclebruce
G'day Heretic,
I'm not sure where you're from but for three years I was the WIRES rep for the Far South Coast (NSW Wildlife Information and Rescue Service). I have hand raised a few wombats and will post photos of them when I can. They're solid little buggers that's for sure. Their biology is unbelievable - no creature on earth comes close to squeezing as much nutrient and fluid out of thier food. They are also one of the fastest creatures on earth over a short distance (a bit like Boony was the fastest man on earth with cricket pads on
Winters on its way - whooo hoo the wombats will soon be comming out!
ooo that reminds me - it's wombat mum's 89th birthday in less than two hours.
unclebruce
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heretic
yeah mate, boony was a legend. Gotta love oz.
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FSMonster
Unclebruce, No problems. I hope that the quotes should help onlookers realize that "missing link" in itself is a bad term to use. Even 'transitional forms' is not quite useful as we're all at present are 'transitional forms' to something else far far in the future. I hope. :-) But if some are insisting on finding the 'missing link' and archeopteryx isn't enough they should confront their cluelessness with this newest discovery.
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Shining One
It's not a 'missing link' of any sort. This is called an AMPHIBIAN and each one is a species. There is no proof that this fossil evolved from anything. I see stuff like this and remember the completed drawings of creatures based on a few bone fragments. Remember the Scopes (Monkey) trial? Their wonderful drawing of an ape man was actually backed up by ONE TOOTH and it was a PIG'S TOOTH! LOL
Rex
