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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
Remember, when confronted with a Jurassic Beaver, make sure to stand perfectly still. They can only see movement.
OH NO....ARGHHHHHHH!!!
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
I suppose papermaking, the compass, gunpowder and printing never were that noteworthy anyway...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_man
Oh, sorry, that one is British.
The latest Slashdot meme.
It's easy to tell if it's a real Chinese beaver or not. Real Chinese beavers are very small and they taste like salted cashews.
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.
On the other hand - the mammals didn't originate from nothing 65 million years ago, but they were at the time more adaptable than the reptiles. This means that mammals must have existed earlier than 65 million years ago, but it is likely that they resembled mice and other small mammals and fed on insects and vegetation.
Most fossils that we actually have from the jurassic period are large and important as they seem they are likely to be the top of an iceberg where the mass of animals are likely to be small. Unfortunately - small dead animals are likely to dissolve completely or have been eaten to the very last piece. This means that finding small fossilized animals will help us to understand the evolution better - so start digging!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Right, because the only possible explanation for this must be that our entire theory of evolution must be out to lunch. No, it couldn't possibly be anything else /sarcasm.
Every single time the theory of evolution needs to be revised, you ID/creationist zealots pounce and proclaim that "evolution is disproved!!!" Bullshit.
A scientific theory is subject to revision when and if new data shows itself. That is in part why they're called theories - theory in science does not mean "guess", as ID proponants like to insinuate, but rather means an explanation for a phenominon that is as current as our understanding can make it. When we learn more, we go back and make changes to a theory to account for the new data.
Theories are almost never completely thrown out, but are often radically altered as we become more knowledgeable; Einstein didn't disprove Newton's theories about motion, but because of him we do know far more than Newton did in his time.
This does not disprove Darwin. Quit salavating; your bias is showing.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
Torrents for Jurassic Beavers 2 & 3 already on line...
Task Mangler
The tissue was inside the bone, and they had to chemically remove the hard minerals before they could take a look at the soft tissues preserved. So I think it's pretty reasonable to say number three, our assumptions about fossilization, is the thing we should be looking at changing.
It's funny how quick people are to throw out evolution.
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!
?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.