Massive New Cambrian-Era Fossil Bed Found

jfbilodeau sends word of a massive new trove of fossils located in Canada, which scientists say will rival the acclaimed Burgess Shale fossil bed. The rock formation inside which both fossil sites were found is roughly 505 million years old (abstract). The fossils provide insight into the Cambrian explosion, a time that brought the rapid appearance and diversification of many animal forms. "In just two weeks, the research team collected more than 3,000 fossils representing 55 species. Fifteen of these species are new to science." Paleontologist Jean-Bernard Caron said, "The rate at which we are finding animals — many of which are new — is astonishing, and there is a high possibility that we'll eventually find more species here than at the original Yoho National Park site, and potentially more than from anywhere else in the world." The fossils at the new site are about 100,000 years younger and are better preserved than those at the renowned Burgess shale site.

Comments

Does North Carolina know this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or because it is not in the US it doesn't exist?

Re:It's the devil

[Punko]

I always though the Fundamentalist position was that fossils were put there by God, so as to test the faith of hapless followers.

Colour me surprised.

Thank goodness neither position has anything to do with the real world.

Unknown species

[symes]

I am not a paleontologist and was surprised that 15 of the 55 species found were previously unknown. I really thought we knew more. Is it possible that a significant find could radically change the way we think of the past?

Re:Unknown species

[RichMan]

The fossil record is mainly a few specific locations, each location being a small time window of that location.
Without visiting the Gallapagos islands all those distinct species would never have been observed.

The fossil record is like looking through a tiny peephole at the crowd of life.

There can also be a lot of confusion between juviniles and adults of species. Are they distinct species or not? Sometimes the body size and skeletal formation can be quite different between the young and the old.

Re:Unknown species

[GameboyRMH]

Radically? I'd say not from a layman's point of view. The biggest that happened in my lifetime is probably finding organ details of dinosaurs that indicate they weren't cold-blooded like modern lizards.

It shouldn't be a surprise that so many species have gone unknown, especially as far back as the Cambrian period. The odds of a creature being fossilized are very low after all.

Re:Unknown species

[Charliemopps]

I really thought we knew more.

We don't. We're aware of a tiny fraction what was around then... and usually only animals that had skeletons. Think of sharks... the only reason we know how long they've been around if because we find their teeth. There could have been entire species of invertebrates that ruled the earth and we'd have little chance of ever finding out.

Re:Unknown species

[JoeMerchant]

We've found a lot of fossils, from thousands of sites like this one around the world.

Take nets the size of an average fossil site, scatter 10,000 of them at random sites around the planet today, look at what you just caught. Now, take one more net and throw it at a new location - did you just catch anything new or different? Now, throw in the dimension of time - this site is geographically close to other well studied fossil sites, but displaced 100,000 years in time.

Satellite communications and jet travel make the world seem much smaller than it actually is, and 100,000 years can make a big difference in the local food-web.

Re:Unknown species

[Savage-Rabbit]

I am not a paleontologist and was surprised that 15 of the 55 species found were previously unknown. I really thought we knew more. Is it possible that a significant find could radically change the way we think of the past?

Well, if we find rabbit bones stuck between the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex we'll have to give creationism a second though.

Re:Unknown species

[RabidReindeer]

Radically? I'd say not from a layman's point of view. The biggest that happened in my lifetime is probably finding organ details of dinosaurs that indicate they weren't cold-blooded like modern lizards.

It shouldn't be a surprise that so many species have gone unknown, especially as far back as the Cambrian period. The odds of a creature being fossilized are very low after all.

I'm not sure that being endothermic was such a shock to me.

Putting feathers on T-Rex, however...

Re:Unknown species

[quantaman]

I'm not surprised we're finding new species back then as we're still finding new species now.

Also consider between Yoho and Kootnay we may not be getting precisely the same habitat. Just go for a walk outside and the ecosystem can vary wildly within a small geographic area. And with a 100,000 year gap (not sure how accurate that number is) that's enough time for a few new species to evolve, go extinct, or even migrate into or out of that ecosystem depending on climate conditions. Just 10,000-12,000 years ago we had megafauna like mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and giant beavers roaming North America, over the history of the earth I'd expect there's been a LOT of different species.

There's also the number of species to choose from, in both Yoho and Kootnay only a small subset of the species from those ecosystems were preserved and recovered, even if it was the same ecosystem and habitat you'd expect to get different subsets.

Re:This makes no sense

[jfbilodeau]

That's because evolution is not found in books, but on stone tablets.

One of the most misunderstood term. CE

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Cambrian explosion is one of the most misunderstood terms, sometimes very willfully misrepresented. The "explosion" unfloded over a minimum of 10 million years, but more likely estimate is between 20 and 50 million years. For a species that has been in existence for less than 0.1 million years, belonging to a genus existing for less than 3 million years calling this an "explosion" is incomprehensible. Tool usage is less than 2 million years old. Fire has been tamed for 0.5 million years. Language is probably 0.075 million years old. Domestication of animals is 0.015 million years old. Plants> 0.01 million years, writing is 0.005 million years old. Metallurgy is 0.004 million years old at most. Now try to imagine how long 10 million years was.

All that happened was the emergence of bones/shells. This was the first thing that could fossilize. Everything earlier had just soft tissues and they did not fossilize well. So there was an "explosion" of fossilization, not necessarily speciation.

Re:One of the most misunderstood term. CE

[rasmusbr]

TFA goes into exactly that aspect. Apparently they found species at this site that are also present in a 10 million years older site in China, so unless these critters had access to time travel they could not exactly have been evolving at an explosive rate.

Re:It's the devil

[Charliemopps]

No, you got trolled.

Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones. But only the loud and idiotic get on TV so now we have a christian stereotype. I believe in God and I don't presume to tell him how he went about creating the universe. In my opinion science is the method by which we understand God.

As far as the literal interpretation of the Bible goes... I've never really thought any religion, especially Christianity, intended for entire professions to be wrapped up in deciphering their holy works word for word to find hidden meanings. The Bible gives a pretty clear and definitive guide to being a good person. If someone needs to spend half an hour flipping from page to page to show me the clues to that lead them to believe some secret truth held there-in I usually just write them off as having way too much time on their hands. I know I'm a good person and have faith that God agrees with me. After I'm dead, if I find out Gods as big of a Jerk as these people have been claiming all along, well I don't want to hang out with him anyway. And if I find out there is no God... well I guess I wont find out will I? So it doesn't matter.

Re:It's the devil

[Punko]

Not a Christian stereotype, a fundamentalist one. I refuse to stereotype as Christian those that use the Christian moniker for such restrictive viewpoints.

I completely agree that most Christians believe in evolution and the use of science to understand the existing universe, regardless of the source of the Universe.

I don't know personally anyone who believe in the literal truth of the various holy books lying around.

As someone placed in the Christian faith not by my choice, it bugs me when folks use "Christian" as a descriptor to mean "I do what I want, how I want, in the name of Christianity". Folks like that have no issue treating certain other folks badly, all in the name of some misguided (my opinion) understanding of certain phrases.

Re:It's the devil

[WindBourne]

As someone placed in the Christian faith not by my choice, it bugs me when folks use "Christian" as a descriptor to mean "I do what I want, how I want, in the name of Christianity". Folks like that have no issue treating certain other folks badly, all in the name of some misguided (my opinion) understanding of certain phrases.

Personally, I find it interesting that men like Lincoln ran around saying that they hoped that they were doing what god wanted, while working hard to be good, while men like reagan and W ran around saying that they knew that god backed them in what they did and that it was all good, in spite of the lies, deceit, and thousands/millions (respectively) that were murdered in all of their invasions.

Re:It's the devil

[QRDeNameland]

Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones.

Those statements are questionable without some significant disclaimers. Are you taking about worldwide or just the US? What qualifies as 'Christian' 'fundmentalist' or 'believing in evolution'?

Consider the latest highly publicized Pew Research poll on the subject. One-third of Americans believe "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time". Note that's not disagreeing with the theory of natural selection or postulating 'God's hand', this is utter denial that species evolved over extremely long periods of time. For those that identify as white evangelical Protestants (a good surrogate for 'fundamentalist', I'd say) , that number is 64 percent. Also, FWIW, only 43 percent of Republicans agree that "humans and other living things have evolved over time".

So at least in the US, it would appear that most 'fundamentalists' (and Republicans) *do* reject the evolution of species outright. And while I can't say that third of *all* Americans that would represent a majority of Christians, it is safe to assume that those people would overwhelmingly skew Christian, and therefore if most Christians *do* believe in evolution, it's a slim (and apparantly shrinking) majority, at least in the US.

Clearly, deniers of evolution are not just a fringe minority with a loud voice, these beliefs are frighteningly mainstream.

The tally so far

[Anonymous Coward]

48 comments before this, and 28 of them taking stabs at the fundamentalist anti-dinosaur strawman. I came for a fight and wasn't disappointed. Never mind that the other side didn't even show up.

Re:It's the devil

[QRDeNameland]

How one asks the poll questions is important.

Read the link from the previous post. Respondents had two choices: "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" or "humans and other living things have evolved over time". That's about as binary a choice as is possible on the subject, and the former choice pretty well defines 'creationist', that is, that one rejects all evidence of the evolution of species.

These results are pretty much in line with all other polls I've seen over the last 25 years. Do you have any contrary evidence to show that these numbers are massively overstated? Otherwise your clutching at straws to dismiss such data as just something to validate a deeply held hope that there are many "dumb people" out there (I, for one, find no hope at all in the idea) strikes me as a mere rationalization to deny that it could actually be true.

Re:Better preserved than the Burgess Shale????

[cbhacking]

Yeah... against a backdrop of 505 million years, 0.1 million years is 0.002% difference in the time scale. That's potentially significant for a handful of species, sure, but it's less time than modern humans have existed... which makes it a nearly-trivial eye-blink in evolutionary history. Not completely trivial, though, especially if the environment at the time was driving fairly rapid adaptation.

Re:It's the devil

[TechyImmigrant]

> I believe in God

Why?

Re:It's the devil

[QRDeNameland]

Really? While it doesn't make any distinction between anywhere on the spectrum from "I fully accept the theory of natural selection and the timelines of mainstream paleontology" to "I accept scientific observations that the earth is billions of years old, but I believe God intelligently designed the process", it does provide a properly binary choice: either you believe that the factual evidence for the evolution of species is real, or you don't. What third option is there?

Sorry, but if one agrees with "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time", then then that person *is* by definition the most extreme form of evolution doubter, i.e., the young earth creationist. (OK, I guess there might be some old earth creationists out there that believe that life has continued for billions of years in unchanged form, but that makes about as much sense as the the young earth evolutionist.)

If you want to disagree with the actual results/methodology, fine, but as I've noted, these numbers are not out of line with other polls I've seen. But it's disingenuous to attack the wording of the question when so many respond affirmatively to a statement that is unambiguously equivalent to "the evolution of species never happened".

Re:It's the devil

[Stinky Cheese Man]

I can't defend the appalling behavior of your street-corner preacher, for "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" and "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

But C. S. Lewis had a good answer to your question about the square circle (or the more often heard question of "could God make a rock so large that he could not move it.")

"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.

... meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.'

It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."