Slashdot Mirror
Jurassic Beavers Challenge Current Mammal Theories
Bombula writes "According to a BBC article, Castorocauda lutrasimilis, a beaver-like creature discovered in the Jiulongshan Formation in China which apparently lived 164 million years ago, poses challenges to conventional theory of mammalian history. That is, of course, assuming this is a genuine fossil - no small assumption, given Chinese fossils' track record of forgery, fabrication, and fraud."
You can find some examples of fossil forgeries at http://www.paleodirect.com/fakechinesefossils1.htm
The article's authors must have been less interested in generating Australian interest than Slashdot sometimes seems to be, but save for the shape of its mouth the fossilised critter appears to have had much more in common with Australia's peculiar aquatic monotreme than with the mentioned northern hemisphere placentals.
The fossil even has spurs on its hind legs just where the modern platypus has its unique-amongst-mammalia poison delivery system. Front legs equipped for burrowing suggests in may have also used very playpus-like diggings.
While detailed dental structure is particularly important for cladistics, it is also something that can be subject to high selection pressure -- you have to keep eating -- so it would not be that unlikely that an otter-like snout would evolve into that equally unique to mammals duck bill during a 165 million year river journey from China to Oz.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
In a seperate article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, they talked with the rep from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History who was part of the team that made the discovery. It was not solely Chinese. It was funded by the Carnegie and I suppose the fossils will be on display in PIttsburgh at some point.
"This means that mammals must have existed earlier than 65 million years ago"
Mammals originated in the Triassic period over 200 million years ago, they are as old or maybe even a tad older than dinosaurs. Most known fossil mammals are small and shrew-like, but recently suprisingly large and advanced forms have been found. This new find is just the newest reason to rethink the evolution of Mesozoic mammals. Looks like they were way more diversified already in the age of dinosaurs than previously thought. However, it was the generalists that survived the KT extinction 65 mya and gave origin to modern mammals, including us.
I dare to disagree. Recent big cases of misconduct (Jan Hendrik Schoen, Hwang Woo-Suk) involved forged data submitted, reviewed and published in...Science. Peer-reviewing for Science definitely isn't better than for J. Am. Chem. Soc., J. Phys. Chem., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. or even Acta Cryst E. (I'm dead serious on Acta Cryst - some co-editors there do a fantastic job!). The problem is: If you're trying to boost your career with fabricated results, you will probably not succeed by submitting a manipulated CIF file to Acta Cryst but try to aim at the most prestigious journals - Science and Nature. Don't get me wrong on the original article in question; i have no idea whether the data are correct or not. But Science is not the Holy Grail - the reviewers have failed in the past and will do so in the future - the crap flood submitted by egomaniacs is simply to big!
Hey Smartacus, alloys of copper and tin are bronze. Iron is an element.
Actually, no, it doesn't prove that. If DNA determines what the animal will look like and how its body functions, then similar animals will have similar DNA, whether they are in any way related or not.
As for being able to draw family trees, you can take random strings and draw a "family tree" for them by comparing them and their differences to each other. With long enough strings, there's bound to be similar sequences, especially since DNA only has 4 possible "letters". These kind of diagrams can't be used to prove evolution, since they assume evolution as one of their prerequisites.
That might be, but your claims don't disprove it; in fact, it cannot be disproven, since it is simply impossible to prove that something happened by chance and not as a part of some kind of plan.
Flip a coin. Observe it land tails up. Did it land tails up by chance or because a supernatural being who made the universe had planned it that way before time began and either designed the universe in such a way that it would happen or used its supernatural power in present to make it happen ? Have fun trying to disprove the latter two possibilites ;).
Equating "unscientific" with "wrong" is a mistake. "Unscientific" simply means "not provable or disprovable by science". It does not say anything about truth or untruth of the claim.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
?Informative?? Gakkk!
Your highschool biology teacher seriously needs to be shot. You don't have foggiest clue about genetics.
If DNA determines what the animal will look like and how its body functions, then similar animals will have similar DNA, whether they are in any way related or not.
That's like suggesting the New York Times and the Washington Post will contain the same sequence of letters and the same punctuation and the same pictures because they both reported on news for the same day.
Genes to do similar things will not be the least bit alike unless they are copied from the same parent source, just as two math textbooks will not contain the same sequence of letters unless they are copied from the same parent source. Octopus eyes look almost identical to human eyes and function almost identical to human eyes. The DNA code for octupus eyes and human eyes are about as similar as the letters in Romeo and Juliette compared to the letters in a Calculus text book.
Whale DNA is practically identical to hippo DNA, and is wildly different than fish DNA. That is because hippos are probably the closest living relative of whales.
As for being able to draw family trees, you can take random strings and draw a "family tree" for them by comparing them and their differences to each other. With long enough strings, there's bound to be similar sequences, especially since DNA only has 4 possible "letters".
Your math teacher needs to be shot too.
Even with only 4 letters, the odds of getting matches by chance goes to zero exponentially fast as you look at sequences of any signifigant length. In case the phrase "goes to zero exponentially fast" wasn't clear enough, the odds of you hitting the lottery jackpot every single week, week after week, for some number of months in a row.... that is what I mean by "goes to zero exponentially fast". And that's just looking at short genetic letter sequences. Looking at moderate length genetic sequences it's like hitting the lottery 5000 times out of 5200 consecutive weeks (100 years). The other 200 times you missed the jackpot by a single digit due to a mutation.
Two news articles reprorting the same news story will have COMPLETELY different letter sequences unless they are copied from the same original story. Two texts for two news stories that have 99.8% identical letter sequences are indisputably related and copied from a common source with that 0.2% misscopying.
As for being able to draw family trees
Evolution predicts an extremely strict tree pattern when comparing the genetics of the species on earth, and genetic analysis has confirmed that tree pattern to several hundred nines worth of a decimal places. That it is essentially infititely improbable for the matching tree pattern not to have cropped up by mere chance.
It is a real tree pattern and it provides conclusive poof that either evolution's tree of common decent is correct, or some other process indistingishable from evolution's common decent.
Let me give you a more concrete example of the sort of evidence we have. Every once in a while some fragment of viral DNA will accidentally get inserted into the host DNA and go inert, merely getting passed down to all dencedants. All across the DNA of every animal there are countless examples of such viral DNA insertions. The odds of two independant inserstions of identical viral DNA fragments at identical locations into the host DNA is essentially zero. However humans and chimps both have an identical viral DNA fragment inserted at an identical location. That is because there was a single insertion event in the human chimp ancestor. No other species on earth has this DNA fragment at this location. Going further back in the family tree, there is another such identical viral DNA insertion at an identical location in humans and chimps and apes. No other species on earth has this DNA fragment at this location. There's no example shared by humans
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Not really, but I thought people might like a link to the Carnegie Museum's press release, which in turn links to a set of pictures of the beast. (Nice big pictures, too.)
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.