Paleo – Page 119

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Fossil Fingers Fuddle Phylogeny

December 3, 2003

Another fossil complicates the evolutionists’ picture of tetrapod origins (see Aug 9 headline). Chinese paleontologists have reported1 a new marine reptile from Triassic strata (242 million years old, more or less). Unexpectedly, it has extra digits (a condition called polydactyly) just like the putative ancestors of tetrapods from the earlier Devonian strata (370-354 million years […]

Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered

December 2, 2003

A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News. It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together. To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]

Fossils

How Bambi Gave Rise to Moby Dick

December 20, 2002

The title of this entry, in Kipling Just-So Story format, is only slightly modified from an article from The Guardian, titled, “How Bambi evolved into Moby-Dick.” This is not a joke; check on the link and see. The article is about the latest fossil claimed to be ancestral to whales. Hans Thewissen (Northeastern […]

Early Man

Human-Ape Gap Quadruples

December 20, 2002

Remember that old truism that humans and chimpanzees share 98.5% of their genes? Try 94% instead. That’s a new estimate by Matthew Hahn (Indiana U) and a team who published in a new online journal, PLoS One.1 J.R. Minkel, writing for Scientific American, said “The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution As Assumption

December 20, 2002

51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted. Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.” They used an evolutionary […]

Dumb Ideas

Cooking Up Human Evolution, Or a Crock?

December 20, 2002

51; What’s cooking in human evolution stories? “Cooking is what made us human,” announced zoologist Richard Wrangham on New Scientist. “Cooking food allowed our ancestors to evolve our big brains, the zoologist argues, and created the gender roles still observed by most people.” The reporter apparently did not catch the embedded Lamarckism in that sentence. […]

Biomimetics

Intelligent Design Put to Good Scientific Use

November 20, 2002

51; Evolutionists try to portray intelligent design as something outside of science that threatens science. Actually, the techniques of intelligent design are hard at work within science, and have been for some time. Examples are not hard to find on a variety of fronts. Archaeology: “The ability to tell the difference between crystals that formed […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Reduce Human Ideals to Molecules

November 20, 2002

Two recent stories illustrate the attempt by some evolutionary biologists to reduce complex human behaviors to chance events among molecules. You Are What You Get High On: Michael Balter in ScienceNow asked, “Did endorphins make us more human?” Pondering that question is a photo of a chimp and a naked ape (i.e., man) facing opposite […]

Dumb Ideas

Out-of-Africa Theory Becomes More Convoluted

November 20, 2002

The old simple story that early modern humans migrated out of Africa 40,000 years ago and took over Europe from brutish Neanderthals just got more complicated. A new theory mentioned in National Geographic News now proposes that they took a side trip to India first, 70,000 years ago. After knocking off Heidelberg Man there, they […]

Fossils

Another Tetrapod Ancestor Claimed

October 20, 2002

Maybe the Aussies want their share of missing link notoriety; an unusual fish with bony fins has been discovered in western Australia, reported in Nature.1 The bigger the splash a missing link makes for reporters, the better. The story on Science Daily said, “A fossil fish discovered in the West Australian Kimberley has been identified […]

Dinosaurs

Waltzing with Dinosaurs

September 20, 2002

51; An international team of paleontologists wrote a kind of “State of the Tyrannosaur Address” in Science last week,1 boasting about all that is known of these creatures: Tyrannosaurs, the group of dinosaurian carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest relatives, are icons of prehistory. They are also the most intensively studied extinct dinosaurs, […]

Dumb Ideas

Rooting for Human Evolution

September 20, 2002

Can you squeeze human blood out of a turnip? A new story floating around for how humans began their long divergence away from apes in the jungle was that they developed a taste for roots. EurekAlert reported a story coming out of U of Minnesota: “About five to seven million years ago, when the lineage […]

Amazing Facts

Big Bird Was Scary

September 20, 2002

51; A giant fossil bird with a serrated-edge beak was found in Chile, reported Science Daily, PhysOrg, Live Science, and New Scientist. The projections on its beak look like teeth but are not true teeth. They probably helped the sea bird hold onto fish. The artist reconstruction gives the bird a scary-looking demeanor. […]

Early Man

Dmanisi Homo erectus Fossil Count Grows

September 20, 2002

More bones matching the skulls from the purported Eurasian Homo erectus skulls in Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia have been found (for background, see 08/31/2005 bullet 5, 03/20/2005, 08/01/2002, 11/29/2002). The find was reported in Nature1 with commentary by Daniel Lieberman in the same issue.2 The bones, including ribs, leg bones and arm bones, fingers and […]

Early Man

Press Goes Ape Over Baby Lucy

September 20, 2002

The news media, especially National Geographic, BBC News, and Associated Press (see Fox News) have new fodder for human-evolution stories and artwork, now that a partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis has been reported in Nature.1 The teeth, cranium, shoulder blades, fingers, inner ear, hyoid bone and other well-preserved parts match “typical African ape morphology.” This […]

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