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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.'"
but i would have preferred something called a "rat-squirrel" remain extinct
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Let's introduce this little guy to the TRS-80, a '59 Chevy, and the reincarnated ghost of Archie Bunker!
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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.
Is this another Coelacanth?
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Or 3,900 years...depending on whether you are wrong or not. Jesus saves!
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.....you say fossil rising from the grave.....
I call her my wife...
But has it POWERED UP yet?
Sorry, couldn't resist....
Much like Bob the dinosaur, the Diatomyidae has simply been in hiding.
And also
The reports of Diatomyidae's extinction have been premature. To correct this, the Museum of Natural History has offered $1000 for every dead Diatomyidae brought to them, as this is cheaper than correcting the records of Diatomyidae's extinction. And would make the scientists right again.
Does this mean I can finally have my Ribwich again?
You posted on March 11 at 11:11PM. That is impressive.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Jesus, you have to explain your joke in your title.... and the joke isn't even funny!
I'm no expert here but he never claimed he was "Jesus"
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Jesus won't rise from his grave for another month.
The third most important thing I have learned in life: Squeeze anything hard enough and it eventually makes a noise.
Knowledge of the Laotian rock rat has been around for about a decade now, but it was originally classified in a new family, prior to its connection to the 11 million year old family.
"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.'" Flawed statement for two reasons: a) If you could compare million years old fossils with today's living creatures of the same species to determine the accuracy of the technique, why not do it for animals known to have existed that far back (e.g crocodiles, some iguanas etc) b) Most importantly, if they find inaccuracies in the conclusions extracted from the fossil record of the thought to be extinct animal, how can they be sure that it is not evolution that caused the differences? In other words, the species in question involved a little, so that it does not match the fossil record. Point (b) also counters my point (a).
Animals which died 11 million years ago can have their remains dated to 11 million years. Some of their descendants are still alive today, which doesn't change the fact that their ancestors died a long time ago.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Hardly, carbon dating isn't useful at 11 million years.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
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?
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This is why the moderation guidelines (used to) suggest moderating at -1 -- so that you don't confuse a quoted response with a off-topic/troll original comment. If in doubt as to why something is posted, you can always click on the 'parent' link to make sure you know what is being responded to.
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Millions of years in the grave and it didn't even notice.
A few of their watches are nice though.
No. The fossilized remains were from species within the same genus, but not the same species as found today. Because we have found ancient homo erectus fossils, yet Man lives today, does not mean that carbon dating is wrong, nor does it mean that we were resurrected from homo erectus remains.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
This discovery also provides a compelling argument for preservation efforts in Southeast Asia.
I would say definitely this does not provide such an arguement at all.
Obviously, these animals have done fine without scientists meddling around in their habitat. I read an article (possibly the linked article) about these animals a few days ago, and the scientists were 'eager' to trap a few live.
Uh... I guess they'll need 'further funding' for the effort as well, we can figure.
Habitat preservation is a serious issue, and I am not going to pretend it isn't important. But let's be real, the animals did fine without it up to this point, so this is hardly an instance where the evidence shows a 'compelling arguement.' It's just a newly discovered species.
I thought my watch was coming back into style.
So Scrat really did survive the Ice Age.
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
So, gokulpod, while it's a known fact that I've dirtied the room more than you could ever imagine, should I nevertheless investigate the nether regions of your old wardrobe and really find out what's inside? Now that your true inclinations are out of the closet, I foresee a few skeletons dropping out of that cupboard.
More than mere navel gazing.
I'd like to see you carbon date anything 11 million years old, given that carbon dating is only able to date things less than 0.06 million years old.
But the answers are no, and no. Coelocanths are a previous example of "only known from millions-of-years-old fossils until found alive". And plenty of living creatures strongly resemble ancestral creatures that existed 11 million years ago. Sharks and turtles are the classic "evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, and then stopped because they were so well-adapted" animals, and there are vastly more if we drop the timeframe to a mere 11 million years. See, for example, the genus Canis, which dates back to the Miocene.
There's a 'that' missing somewhere.
More than mere navel gazing.
Panda bears, polar bears, African elephants, all of the surviving Great Apes etc, fall into the former category. This makes the territory easy to explore. It also means that the region will likely be heavily surveyed by both corporations and environmentalists, each trying to win concessions to their perspective.
(Having said that, even well-studied populations aren't necessarily as well-understood as thought. At least one species of dolphin off the coast of New Zealand has turned out to really be two distinct species - drastically reducing the population of the first group. A group of Right Whales off the coast of Australia has also been demonstrated to really be multiple, genetically distinct species.)
Extremely remote locations aren't as well-studied. It's much harder to send undergraduates to remote islands around Papau New Guinea. No beer. Very remote locations are extremely difficult and expensive to study, so they generally aren't. This is where the bulk of "new species" and "rediscovered species" are found. These locations are generally under much less pressure, which means that amateur and semi-professional researchers are unlikely to take the time and effort to go - they're generally needed much more elsewhere.
Then, you've the problem of extremely small animals. The rediscovered woodpecker in North America is not the biggest bird on Earth, is highly mobile (duh!), blends in well with the environment, and is very probably terrified of people - the only people who go into that particular woodland being hunters. This rat-squirrel is likely smaller still, probably bleds in a lot better, and has had 11 million years of practice at running away.
Finally, numbers are very important. If you mis-count by 10 out of 1000 elephants, the number is basically still the same. If you mis-count by 10 the number of Yahtzee River dolphins (of which there are somewhere between 0 and 33 left), it is somewhat more significant. The scientists have not seen any of these rat-squirrels alive and only the one that was caught. As far as anyone is concerned, that may have been the last one alive - at present, we have no evidence to the contrary. If populations have been extremely low and highly localized, which is likely the case, then it was sheer chance that it was ever seen at all. See the story behind the discovery of the Wollemi Pine for other such discoveries.
(Numbers are absolutely critical when it comes to observing small species. It's easier to see one rhino from a mile off than ten dormice from a hundred feet, or a hundred fairy shrimp from five paces. As such, you need comparitively VAST numbers before you are likely to ever see anything at all.)
I don't completely trust the population counts (see my comments about genetically distinct species) but the observations I've seen would imply the counts may be far too high in some cases, NOT the other way round. There will unquestionably be more "living fossils" discovered over time, but the numbers will remain insignficant compared to the number of species that have genuinely been driven extinct - by "natural causes" or by human activity. This find ADDS to the urgency of efforts to save what there is, not the other way round.
(For a start, if its nearest cousin died off 11 million years ago, the population is likely genetically very similar, leaving it vulnerable to disease and genetic disorders. There is also no possibility of bolstering numbers through cross-breeding efforts - a rescue tactic used by some conservationists when "pure" populations are simply not possible any longer, as there's nothing left on Earth that will be even remotely close enough.)
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http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/rock-rat-back- from-extinction/2006/03/11/1141701733549.html
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TO GP : Because C14 dating goes only so far as a few 10 of thousands of year this is not even in question. Google for yourself, or go to wiki, I am tired to provide the link each time an evolution/carbon dating/fossile question pop up. For period of time this big other radio element with longer half-life or other method are used. This bring me to this rant : in these day of age with a wiki and google why is it so difficult to check fact for yourself ?
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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?
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I think the nagging assumption behind this question is, if the carbon dating is in fact accurate, then why hasn't this species evolved in the last 11 million years? Survival of the fittest certainly has eliminated a large majority of their population, and if the current species had no significant variation from an 11,000,000 year old fossil.. It doesn't seem the two theories co-habitate well in this situation.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
Other radioisotopes are often used for dating fossils, along with location in the strata etc.
E.g.: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Next thing you know, some one will discover a BSD installation in the wild.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
argument for preservation efforts in Southeast Asia. And if you believe in Intellgent Design, it provides compelling argument that the earth is very young, or how could they have survived.
Pandas aren't spotted.
They're black and white and red all over.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The Yahtzee river dolphins are freaks of nature developed by Hasbro entertainment as a stunt of genetic engineering, and should be removed from the natural cycle.
I believe you mean Yangtze river dolphins.
More to the point, why have crocodiles not changed much in 100 million years?
Perhaps it has something to do with the way creatures live. An organism which lives on the edge, so to speak, like a cheatah or a falcon, will experience selective pressure because there are so many ways for an individual in that species to fail at what they do.
Crocs just float into the water until their prey happens to come along: doesn't matter what really, then they eat it.
So maybe the answer is they they don't experience much selection pressure because of the (relatively) shit existance they live.
Another possibility is that the Crocodile lifestyle is a kind of local mininum for which they are well suited. Any change would make them less fit and their environment (creeks, estuaries, ditches) aren't going away any time soon.
I don't know about Diatomyidae, though.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"A burning question... does this call into question the carbon dating methods that "proved" this creature was 11 million years old?"
Geez...
Carbon dating can't be used to date anything older than some 40 000 years. It becomes too inaccurate after that. So the question to your, hmmm, uninformed question is a resounding No.
And even IF we could use C-14 dating to date fossils older than 40 000 years, the answer would still be No. The fossil relatives of this new rodent species were just that - relatives - of the living creature, not the same animal. They belong to the same family, Diatomyidae. In short: the fossils would still be 11 million years old, the living individuals of the rodent species would be recent. Duh.
My burning question is, when will Creationists start reading so that they'd actually know what they're talking about?
"Wouldn't you expect to see major differences between the descendents and their forbears?"
Not necessarily.
"If you say 'no' - how long DOES it take for something to evolve then!?!?"
It depends. If an organism is well-adapted to its environment (check out the example of crocs in a post further below), selective pressures keep it the same way even during millions of years. Evolution doesn't occur at a fixed rate. Seems like you heard it here first.
"Evolution is a glorified hoax."
Sorry to burst your ideological bubble, but it isn't. It's a fact, a natural phenomenon happening out there all the time, no matter if you pull off the "lalalala-not-listening" creationist trick.
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!
That's a pretty simplistic view really isn't it? For example, doesn't the crocodile use river banks to lay their eggs? Don't you think over 100 million years, there must have been a point where natural selection would have evolved the ability to lay their eggs underwater to avoid prey or harsh climates?
I mean if we're talking a hundred million years, there's got to be at least a few deficiencies in a cold-blooded reptile that could be tweaked or improved, given the chaotic changes the Earth has undertook in the last 100 million years.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
Actually, I think the wonderful news is instead for paleontologists, whether they agree with theories of evolution or not. Regardless of whether you feel the world was created billions of years ago or only a few thousand, you have to admit that reconstructing what a species looked like from its fossilized remains requires quite a bit of guess work. Techniques have been developed to make such guesses as accurate as possible, but the discovery of an actual living representative of the fossilized species allows validation (or invalidation) of those techniques.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
> A burning question... does this call into question the carbon dating methods
> that "proved" this creature was 11 million years old?
No. There are issues with the radioactive dating, but this isn't one of them.
What this *does* demonstrate is that the absense of any evidence (for instance, no known fossils, or no known living specimens) does *not* mean a creature is extinct; it just means there's no evidence. It is possible to know that a type of creature is *not* extinct, if you find living specimens, but it's generally not possible to know for certain that one *is* extinct, and it's *certainly* not possible to know that a particular thing was extinct X number of years in the past.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Really, now - I think you meant "Rat Not Dead Yet"
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You're assuming that the goal of evolution is to produce the best of all possible species, and that's simply not true. Evolution has no goal. Evolution is a series of random mutations. If a particular mutation happens to give an individual some sort of advantage as far as having offspring, that mutation will be carried on in successive generations. If not, it won't.
Crocodiles have survived virtually unchanged, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been some mutations. Until we find some DNA from a crocodile from millions of years ago and compare it to a crocodile of today, we can't say that the croc has not changed at all in all this time.
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 GP said they are EASY to spot. It doesnt matter what colour they are now.
If one wanted to paint spots on animals, a big panda would be a much easier target than some small Laotian rock rat which one probably wouldn't even be able to chase.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Dunno about the 'least', but yes, it is more important to know how a creature's bones looked like instead of knowing whether it was grey on purple when it lived. (Colors do often play a role in the behavior of animals, though.)
anyone for a kebab? http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg1862500 5.600.html/
You'd think that after 10 million years that they'd get tired of being a stinkin rat squirrel.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
It's not just pressure - it's a mutation that gives a survival advantage BEFORE reproduction occurs. In 11 million years, I'd expect SOMETHING to happen to make it easier for those guys to survive!
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
It is, but we only see the part of the creature that protrudes into our 3-dimensional understanding of space/time.
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I hate it when people keep on necromancing long-dead species. I'm short on Turn Undead spells already without having to spend them on zombie rock rats...
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.
It also provides a compelling argument that the world might not be as old as we think it is.
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Anyone for rat pudding !?....
You never catch me alive
I've come across similar things with requirements gathering - the users had specified the exact pantone shade for button foo's background, and the exact pixel position field bar should be at - but ask them what they want the sytem to do and they look at you like you're talking Klingon. Disclaimer: I am one of that minority here that do not speak Klingon.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
-Eric
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This got me thinking. I bet the first thing that scientist do when they reach an advanced state of genetic engineering is resurrect the Dodo, just to shut people up who use that annoying phrase.
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