The 520-million-year-old gentle giant: Fossil reveals bizarre new species of ..filtered plankton

UK Daily Mail ^ | March 27, 2014 | Staff

[C19fan]

Evidence of gentle giants that swam in the oceans more than 500 million years ago has been discovered. Fossils found in northern Greenland show that ancient, giant marine creatures used bizarre, whale-like facial appendages to filter food from the ocean. The study described how the strange species, named Tamisiocaris, used huge, specialised facial parts to filter plankton - similar to the way some modern whales feed today.

[C19fan]

Tamisiocaris is a cousin of the first apex predator, Anomalocaris. Giant is a relative term as the largest animals were in the 3 feet range at that time.

[null and void]

[GraceG]

If I get my Tardis working I may avoid going back that far... the animals would truly look scary as heck...

[SunkenCiv]

Whale meat again, don't know how, don't know when, thanks C19fan.

[C19fan]

Although you would probably be the biggest animal on earth at that time.

[GipperCT]

[Sawdring]

Haha, the author claims this animal is an early ancestor of the whale. I would like to inspect that family tree.

[Little Pig]

The author didn’t. Whoever wrote the captions for the article did. Even so, I suspect it was meant figuratively (Brit English and all that).

My main question is, how do they know this isn’t just a “better” fossil of Anomalocaris, where the filter appendages are visible? There aren’t all that many Anomalocaris fossils to begin with; perhaps all the earlier ones were of already-dead animals where the soft filtering tissues were eaten away.

[BroJoeK]

from the article:

"Lead author Dr Jakob Vinther, a lecturer in macro-evolution at the University of Bristol, said: 'These primitive arthropods were, ecologically speaking, the sharks and whales of the Cambrian era."

There's that term again: "macro-evolution".
I'd like to see it not-used, because it confuses the h*ll out of anti-evolutionists, makes them babble incoherently about frogs turning into birds.

In reality, there's only one evolution -- short-term "micro-evolution" changes, which when accumulated over very long times can lead people to speak of "macro-evolution".
But there was nothing "macro" about it.
It all happened one change at a time -- micro, adaption, with those changes accumulating over many millions of years.

Short-term evolution, long-term evolution:

[Busko]

This is why there is a problem wirth evolution. They want everything to evolve from the “lowest llife forms”. Oncde again, where are the transitional fossils? Like half whale and half whatever? Always missing something.

[Sawdring]

I always think it is better to say it was magic than to try to understand the place the fossil record plays in history.

[BroJoeK]

Busko: "Oncde again, where are the transitional fossils?
Like half whale and half whatever?
Always missing something."

Anti-evolutionists claim of "no transitional fossils" is itself an intellectual slight-of-hand, intended to obscure the indisputable fact that every individual is a "transitional" form between its parents and descendants.
That's because no individual is ever exactly the same as its parents -- and not only because of the mixing of genes, but also because every generation adds a very small number of mutations to its 3-billion+ instructions DNA code.

Most of those small mutations have no effect, or are harmful, but a very few can give the individual a better chance to survive & reproduce.
Hence: evolution.

Therefore, every fossil is in some sense a "transitional form" between its ancestors and descendants.
Indeed, any knowledgeable paleontologist can look at any fossil and point out various features which are "transitional" between fossils which came before, and others which came later.

Human:

Whale:

Bird:

Horse: