300 Million Year Old Fossil Fish Likely Had Color Vision
westlake writes Nature is reporting the discovery of mineralized rods and cones in a 300-million-year-old fossil fish found in Kansas. The soft tissues of the eye and brain decay rapidly after death, within 64 days and 11 days, respectively, and are almost never preserved in the fossil record — making this the first discovery of fossil rods and cones in general and the first evidence for color vision in a fossilized vertebrate eye.
...but was it 4K?
God created the earth and its inhabitants - and therefore rods and cones - somewhere less than 10 000 years ago. Please, please keep this unscientific tripe off Slashdot - after all, all who post here are rational thinkers .... aren't we?
...refute ID or any notion of a god (or, to avoid offense, God).
It's really hard to find a recent (last 40 years) validated scientific result that validates, rather than debases, long held religious beliefs.
Decades ago "factory religions" (i.e., the smart ones, faced with irrefutable evidence, decided to abandon their beliefs and retrench in a new fantasy) abandoned the notion that God (who?) created everything in seven days.
The ignorant and unscientific still cling to "Intelligent Designer" fantasies just as the Taliban (ISIS et al) do to their irrational beliefs. Eventually, all of these will crumble under the advance of logic and reason and the sheer weight of evidence.
Humans, for good ecological reasons, seem to want to create a "supreme being". Even as recently as the Dark Ages, this was probably helpful. When all looks bleak, 1000 civilizations that give up because logic dictates that are are going to fail will fail. One of the 1000 that have the "God Gene" and persevere against all logic may survive and propagate their sperm.
We are all likely offspring of that flawed logic and it is our duty to crush support of that logic just as we, much more recently, reversed our opinions on slavery (i.e., anyone you can beat into submission is now your property).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Do you need to get a licence for fossil fishin'?
no way
Or was everything just black and white before the 1950s?
No disquise, I've got colour vision.
They say you males are often colour blind. That must suck.
Too bad all the content was black and white back then.
Upon first witnessing the glory and splendor of the Universe, they casually remarked, "It'll have to go."
OK, early fish could see in colors. And clearly modern birds (and their dino ancestors) can see in color. There is strong observal evidence that amphibians can see in color too. So just how is it that virtually all mammals supposedly lost the ability to see in color (which itself is hard for me to buy) and yet then the apes evolved the ability to see in color again and they did it with the same rod and code mechanism that was used in the primitive fish. I'm hard pressed to believe that there is an advantage for colorblindness that would have been selected for in the earliest mammals.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Man, science is getting weird!
OK, early fish could see in colors. And clearly modern birds (and their dino ancestors) can see in color
The mineralized rods and cones in this fossil fish are the first to be found in any vertebrate fossil. The argument for color vision in dinosaurs is more or less based on the theory that if a sexually attractive feather-like structure was colored, a dino must have seen it in color.