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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."
Because our role in extinction is closer to "Asteroid Impact" than "Sorry dude, you got out-competed". Being as we drove much of the North-American ice-age macrofauna into extinction, followed by the Auroch (17th century), Dodo (ibid), Passenger Pigeon (19th), almost got the Bison, Cod, and Whales, and are now probably going to finish off our genetic cousins, the Bonobo, for lunch, it would behove us to not casually slaughter something that has survived 11 million years mostly by our absence.
We are the most effective predator ever, with the capability of destruction on a scale unachievable by all but the most extreme natural disastors. That's why we have to make a conscious effort to leave things be, and let nature take their course, rather than our current system "whoops, it doesn't do well in suburbia, guess it just deserves to go."
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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.
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.