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Fossil Rises From its Grave
gokulpod writes "Scientific American reports that a family of animals known as Diatomyidae thought to have been dead for 11 million years has been discovered in Laos. From the article: 'Fossilized remnants of this group have been found throughout Asia with a distinctive jaw structure and molars. It represents a rare opportunity to compare assumptions derived from the fossil record and an actual living specimen to determine overall accuracy of the techniques involved. This discovery also provides a compelling argument for preservation efforts in Southeast Asia.'"
You don't have to find an animal previously believed extinct. There are millions of species around. Just put together case studies of known living animals. Then have a group unfamiliar with the species of interest try to predict its characteristics from genealogical family members.
Why is it that a species thought to be extinct for 11 million years has now just been found, but somehow we seem to think we know the exact number of panda bears and such?
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
Why preserve it? It's obviously been doing just fine for 11 million years.
Also, why should we? I had evolution beat into my brain by every single environmental science teacher I've had since grade school. "Survival of the fittest", natural selection, and all that jazz. Then in the very same classes, and by the very same teachers, I'm told how nothing should ever go extinct and that if anything does that's a bad thing. Extinction is not a bad thing. Over 90% of the animals that ever existed are extinct and thanks to those animals going away, we now have the exotic animals we have today, including humans.
Let the animal be, if it dies then that makes more room for some other animal that can fill the gap. If it lives and flourishes then so be it. Stop pretending to be God and control the natural evolution of animals. For people that don't believe in God, liberal extremists sure do think they are one.
Things don't evolve just for kicks. They evolve when there's pressure on them, and it's either survive or evolve. (And sometimes they don't survive, of course.) So if these guys found a niche that worked for them, why would they evolve anymore?
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Who says it has gone unchanged? These are the descendents that just happen to be most similar to their ancestors. Its a branch that has not died out, a testament to the strength of this particular evolutionary adaptation. Or the creatures' luck in not having their habitat significantly altered. Other descendents, those forced to adapt to localized environmental changes, have likely been adapted through natural selection with different features. As far as the species in TFA, their appear to be known variations. Anyone know of variations of Coelacanth that have either died out (as far as we know) or still exist?
There's no explanation needed. Just because a species remains relatively unchanged for millions of years does not mean that evolution doesn't happen.
It's like talking about black holes and then calling cosmology into question because our sun hasn't become one.
BTW, the linked to article is a steaming pile of dung. If the rest of that periodical is written as poorly, I suggest you stop reading it. The linked article takes quotations from the New Scientist article out of context and implies that it was an article questioning evolution. It wasn't. There are lots of valid ways to question evolution, but twisting other people's words to support your point of view isn't one of them.
"Seriously, is there an explanation to this?"
I'm quite happy with the explanations those scientists mentioned in the Creationist article gave.
Usually living fossils are organisms that
- are superbly adapted to their particular environment/niche
- have a high fecundity rates
- are so generalised they can survive in several niches and conditions.
And even in the case of the Coelacanth, we have to remember that those creatures were common back in their heyday. It's not like this one survived genus (Latimeria) is a wonder of unbelievable probabilities. Considering the multitudes of coelacanths before the KT extinction 65 m.y.a. it becomes actually quite probable that one genus (or the ancestors of the living genus) would survive even that cataclysm.
I think there is a great misunderstanding about evolution at all: Evolution doesn't require livings to constantly change (and as a matter of fact it's not the single living, that changes, it's the long chain of generations which carries the change). Evolution says: If the environment changes (for what ever reason), the cards get newly shuffled, and what was a survival trait before can now be (but doesn't need to be) a disadvantage.
Evolution theory claims that the livings best adapted to the environment survive, and that offspring always has a little variation to the parent generation, caused (for livings creating offspring by sexual contact) by recombination of the genes and mutation (which works also for parthenogenetic offspring). Thus every new generation is faced with a new challenge, and only those livings that are adapted just enough to breed will have offspring, the other lines will die out when the livings which weren't able to create offspring die (for whatever reason: old age, dropping of cliffs, being devoured by other livings, getting sick without recovery...).
Living fossils are livings which didn't change very much since millions of years, and that could simply happen because each generation basically finds the same survival conditions than the generation before. Sharks and crocodils, gingkos and corals all have lived in environments where there was no big pressure on changing the building plan.
"Living fossil" is just a description for a living, which is recent, but where there exists a large fossil record of similar livings, often reaching back in time for millions of years and often spawning more morphological variation than can be found today. That's nothing "anti evolutionary" or such. It just happens. And it will probably happen again that with exploring not yet fully explored habitats (like many parts of the rain forests), we will find recent livings of which until now we have only fossil records because they died out in most of their former environments due to changes they couldn't adapt to.
Actually, this is wonderful news for "us evolutionists". If you had actually RTFA, you'd know that we can now compare those reconstructions we had of the fossil relatives of this animal to the living creature. Great!
I happen to be a paleontologist myself, so you are indeed very correct. I was just being sarcastic about "us evolutionists" since, strictly speaking, "evolutionists" in the ideological way creationists mean it only exist in the minds of creationists. (Unless you want to define 'evolutionist' as somebody working in the field of evolutionary biology.) And I'd honestly like to see a serious paleontologist who doesn't accept evolution as a fact.
In case of creatures of which we have no recent examples (dinosaurs, for instance), the reconstruction does include lots of speculating. Up to the musculature and such everything is fine and dandy (muscles can be reconstructed on the basis of comparative anatomy and bones), but the actual look of the critters is mostly based on educated guesses.
The same answer they gave to Pons and Fleischman. The usual Scientific black or white dogma. The "maybe" answer never applies. Just ignore anything that might be contradictory. Very scientific, that's how all the new discoveries get made.