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Oldest Animal: Fossilized While Hatching
An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of 600 million years old embryo microfossils have been found in China that may be among the first animals. It is a case of preserving the seemingly unpreserveable. The Precambrian coral-like animals seem to have spiral patterns that show some were preserved at the moment of hatching, according to the researchers: 'These organisms lived 600 million years ago -- before big animals. This would be the very first moment of animal evolution preserved in the fossil record.'"
The article says these are microfossils, but still - if they're big enough to survive this long, much less be sliced open for more detailed examination soon, they can't be all that small, can they?
So does this mean we have fossilized evidence to answer whether the chicken or the egg came first?
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
Shouldn't that be youngest animal?
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
*Sets down at his 4,000,000 year old computer and chomps a 56,000 year old hot pocket*
Is that all? 600 million? Mph, not bad for a bunch of lightweights. Is it too late to add some more zeroes already? I mean damn, these people must really be new to this; I've used every known dating method on my entire house, and frankly, my chair is older than that.
I used this knowledge once when I discovered that my mirrors actually evolved from the plates in my cupboard. Sounds farfetched, yeah, but hear me out. The National Organization for Plate Evolution (NOPE) was very skeptical of this theory, trying to tell me mirrors are made by 'intelligent life forms' of some sort. Can you believe that? Talk about a bunch of traitors. This nonsense went on until I said "Well uh, um... 300,000,000 years." at which point we threw a party. I'm now recognized as one of the leading authorities in America by NOPE and by the Organization for Really Gigantic Years (ORGY)
Now if you'll excuse me, my 345 billion year old steak isn't going to cook itself you know.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Evolutionism? Do you also use the terms, "gravitism," or, "atomism"? It seems to me that your polemic is nothing more than an attempt to drag science down to the creationists' level. Rest assured that science is not some sort of alternate religion--it does not involve faith or magic. It does involve evidence and explanations for that evidence.
What's even worse is that you seem to believe that an intelligent sense of proportion is somehow wrong. The time during which humans have lived is small compared to the time during which the Earth has existed and the Earth is not the center of the universe. Sorry if this revelation damages your ego, but that's hardly a fault against the signifigance of this find.
ok, first of all, Evolution is in itself an -ism. it is a sort of atheistic religion that fills in the gap for not having any kind of deity to explain things...well at least for as far back as evolution can go in time.
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next:
THE SCIENCE YOU SPEAK OF IS ALL BASED ON FAITH IN THE FIRST PLACE! can we honestly say that this "reality", as we call it, is actually an absolute in and of itself? or is there an underlying, or overlying if anything, absolute that defines our very existence? if so, then science is NOT the basis of everything. in fact, science should NEVER be considered the basis of anything, it is merely an observation and analysis of what we can actually see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. there is NOTHING that we can possibly even try to observe that eludes all 5 senses. so what we cannot percieve, cannot be science, right? and you do agree that science can only be achieved by standing upon the sholders of those before us, yes? then someone, a long time ago, assumed that what they saw/heard/smelled/touched/tasted was what it was. science was built upon observations, and if observations are assumptions, then science must be in itself an elaborate assumption.
and also, in light of eternity, the time that the universe has existed shows up only as an infinitesimal blip. this sparks the realization of another couple things we cannot begin to comprehend due to our finite speck of knowledge: that which is infinite and/or infinitesimal.
but to return to the topic at hand: how were these fossils dated? how many samplings of the datings did they test? any other specifics?
...and probably tasted like one too.
This whole "first animal evolution" thing reminds me soooo strongly of monks hawking pieces of the genuine cross of Christ.
Also, if the first animal hatched then why do bird fossils - even proper dinosaur fossils - appear so late in the piece? Complexity can't be the answer, since even shrimp and trilobites are as complex as birds in their own ways. And horseshoe crabs - muck-dwellers right at the bottom of the fossil ladder - are still with us today. The fossil sorting we do see seems to be based more on environment and density than on any systematic idea of age.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Also, if the first animal hatched then why do bird fossils - even proper dinosaur fossils - appear so late in the piece?"
If the the first car had wheels, why did the quad cam v8 turbo 4WD appear so late in the piece?
'Hatching' is the general rule right up until mammals, and even then monotremes still lay eggs.
"The fossil sorting we do see seems to be based more on environment and density than on any systematic idea of age."
Yeah, sure it does. Take your creationist tripe elsewhere, this is the *science* section, not the fundamentalist christian religion section.
Cthulhu loves you.
Since these animals were fossilized upon hatching, they didn't reproduce. They might have been the first *something*, but they weren't the ancestors of anything.
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make install -not war
After all, this is the science section, not the philosophy section, and arbitrarily discarding data because it doesn't fit your philosophy is bad science.
A bird is not "better" than a shrimp or a trilobite. Stick a chicken a few fathoms down on a reef and you'll see what I mean. Both listed "primitive" aquatic critters have complex features which birds don't. Your analogy is like saying "these early cars use a steam turbine, why did it take so long to evolve a turbocharged V8?" The V8 is heavier, only burns one fuel, requires more support gear, and the materials technology involved is actually less advanced.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Hey shit for brains.
100 tons
10,000 years
365 days per year
3963 mile radius
5280 ft per mile
2000 lbs per ton
453 grams per lb
You know what that works out to? 60 milligrams per square ft. The worlds a big place and you are puny relative to it. Get over it. Also, how hard can it be to multiply 100*10,000*365 you were off by almost a factor of 3, wtf!
Good science has the property that it increases man's efficient power over the universe. For instance, potential population density, which you might observe through your senses is higher than that of apes. This sort of sense reference is different than the sense-certainity you reference, in that it concentrates on the paradoxes sense-certainity serves up. That is why good science is not really a sense-certainity game. And it has the property that it is efficient with respect to the actual reality.
But I have the idea the unfortunate Bush victory has embolden some of the fundies to spout off. Bush's heartland is the old confederacy. Sort of GOP and slave-holder values, err, share-holder values. Back in the 20's there was a big religious revival in the south. The KKK's intinerate preachers were all over the Northwest. We had the Scopes monkey trial, which brings up this history lesson. And by 1931 the fundies were history. What happened? The depression. People got hungry and this increased their relative sanity. So as you watch the Bush wars and the Bush economy take us down in a spiral of poverty, remember this too shall pass, and so shall the fundies.