Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
The Miller experiment demonstrated how hydrocarbon gases, when subjected to an energy source, were able to combine and produce Amino acids.
This experiment has been reproduced so many times, and under so many different conditions, it would be difficult to list all of them.
So, what was the flaw in this experiment?
One of those "Where to begin?" jobs.
A) The perpetrator has overwhelming faith in a pet theory and feels an urgency to proselytize by deception. B) The perpetrator is incompetent and desires peer respect. C) The perpetrator is not a scientist and finds pleasure in hoodwinking those who take themselves too seriously. D) The perpetrator is afraid of Pascal's wager. E) All of the above!
I know, but it is always enjoyable watching them follow the above steps.
Say what? Guess they weren't all "missing" if some "continue to live" through these years. And is this saying that some elephant "ancestors" stayed the same, while some were evolving? I'm not current on the latest evolutionary theories, they um, evolve so often...
I did find some links to John Kappelman, and this site he was involved with is very interesting, it has extensive bone comparisons of humans, gorillas, and baboons. Most bones have pretty big differences, but I was shocked at how similar the "proximal pedal phalanx 1" bones of a human and a gorilla were. They are so similar, in fact, that they are photographs of the very same bone, lol! See for yourself (click on "comparitive anatomy" at bottom of the site, then choose "human" and "gorilla" and then the bone):
The site has not been updated in a couple of years, and I guess no one noticed this error.
,,, turbocharging had to start somewhere.
And may I say in kind, being an evolutionist means "one who continuosly evolves theory under the broad label 'evolution' to fit the latest contradictory evidence." I know, I know, thats science. But just don't pretend you're on "holy ground" with your theory of the day!
You will see the same arguments used. They MUST believe in it, or their world-view will collapse.
Once again, I do believe that God created life, and science is the exploration of how it was done. I have never understood the reasons for this debate.
lol, yeah, right. Ol' Henry, you've been baiting "creationists" with your "evolutionist" links over the past year(s?) with hundreds of posts, don't pretend you just stumbled in here with some insightful new "revelation." As a self professed logical scientific type, you sure do take the theory with extreme religous zealotry;)
What Universe do you live in?
The Universe that I live in, is almost nothing but H2 (Hydrogen) with some other atoms and molecules derived from those Hydrogen atoms due to nuclear reactions.
NH3, CH3 and H2 are the most common molecules in the Universe that I live in.
I give up, what are you talking about?
No, you came from dust and to dust you shall return. Star Dust.
All the material in your body, heavier than Hydrogen and Helium, was created in hearts of ancient stars which novaed, later to coalesce into other star(s) which also eventually novaed, the dust of which finally formed our star, Sol and its family of planets and YOU.
This isn't some silly superstition, it is fact. You are free, of course, to ignore the obvious.
Yeah, I'm a tragic example of Evos Gone Wild!.
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