Though my response was tongue in cheek I already answered that…(some) creationist explain them by the great flood. IOW, dinosaurs and such were wandering about along side humans prior to the flood. For whatever reasons (God works in mysterious ways and all that) dinosaurs and mammoths and such didn’t survive the flood (maybe they were too big to fit on that big boat thingy), and so died and were rapidly buried when the flood waters, um…went away to where ever all that water came from in the first place.
I HAVE heard the ‘God put them there’ explanation, but that is a really fringe thing even among creationists.
You are trying to use logic on an inherently irrational subject.
Sorry to continue the hijack, but I once saw a creationist children’s book that claimed the dinosaurs did survive the flood, but their food didn’t. Which is even more :dubious: worthy.
Would have been kind of funny to see a T-Rex (or a really big sauropod!) climbing the ramp up to the Arc…or attempting to swim about for 40 days and nights until the water all went away!
(When I was a kid I had to go to CCD and they related the whole Noah’s Arc story. My seemingly counter intuitive question was…what happened to the fish? I got a lot of puzzled looks until I pointed out a few things…like silt in the water and the whole fresh water vs salt water thingy. When I started asking where the water came from and went too I was told to shut up and just listen…)
Wow! A fringe of a fringe. That’s pretty fringey (fringy? fringe-y?). At some point, there’s just this one guy who claims that God put them there at precisely 3:31:08 AM on Thursday, June 14, 4003 BC.
Yes, this is the final missing piece for all those people who already accepted that humans evolved from other apes, and apes are an offshoot of monkeys, but who always contended that primates did not evolve from other mammals.
The woefully undersung ‘primates are special’ branch of fundamentalists.
Well, (collective) you’ve managed to transform a nice thread into a groupwank attacking non-present fundamentalists. Do you miss them? Can we have a nice evolution discussion without someone “filling in” for the Creationists? If they don’t want to say anything, please let’s go to the science.
Nice find
Really? Could you give us an example of an organism that isn’t a transitional form? I suppose that technically, the last generation of a species that went extinct could be put in that category, but those would be far outnumbered by the transitional forms.
True…‘transitional form’ in a modern context could basically mean anything. When I took anthropology and archeology in college (lo these many years ago) it meant something like a species on the cusp of branching off from it’s former line. I’m sorry if my loose (and outdated) definition offended you there. The specimen IS really rare FWIW.
My ancestor may have been an ape! Or even a monkey! But it darned sure wasn’t some stupid little lemur! No-sirree-Bob!
Actually, claiming that humans and anthropoid primates are a Biblical “kind” seems like it would be pretty consistent with the world of some Young Earth Creationists, where tigers and housecats apparently diverged by “micro”(!)evolution within the last 10,000 years! Except that of course we must never, ever, ever acknowledge any kinship with the chimpanzees.
Arg, I HATE these sorts of headlines. “Now confirmed”??? Grrr…
This does look to be a pretty amazing find. But I’m not particularly happy that the news was broken like this, with blaring headlines about missing links and Darwin’s theory somehow being deficient until THIS one new fossil, which clears everything up.
Strictly speaking, most fossil specimens are rare.
As for your definition of “transitional form”, that’s not really something that can be divined from the fossil record. We can only see species after they have already “become”. In order to see a population on the verge of speciation, we’d have to have a much larger pool of fossils to work with. Unfortunately, most fossil species are known only from a single specimen (often fragmentary - in that respect, finding a nearly complete fossil such as this is a rare find), so we can’t determine anything about how close the specimen is to the speciation event that gave rise to it.
Agreed. My understanding is that this is a nearly intact specimen…which is sort of like getting hit by a meteor after winning the lottery.
I agree. My major wasn’t archeology or anthropology…I took the courses because the subject interested me and because the engineering college at the time wanted ‘well rounded engineers’ so required a certain number of humanities type electives. I have a very History Channel level knowledge of the subject…and I was talking pretty loose there even for that.
BTW…if anyone is interested in the whole transitional fossils thingy (and didn’t feel like looking it up for themselves), here is a wiki article on it:
The headline is bad, bit it is a fascinating find. Scientists frequently make “predictions” on various future finds and discoveries and often are proven to be correct.
If any religionista, psuedo scientist or woo-woo believer had anywhere near the same success rate, then they would deserve some consideration. Alas, they don’t and deserve to be written off as primitive, backward thinking cranks.
