Posted on 04/02/2004 4:25:18 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Arlington, Va.—How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the structure and function changes from fin to limb.
The fossil, a 365-million-year-old arm bone, or humerus, shares features with primitive fish fins but also has characteristics of a true limb bone. Discovered near a highway roadside in north-central Penn., the bone is the earliest of its kind from any limbed animal.
"It has long been understood that the first four-legged creatures on land arose from the lobed-finned fishes in the Devonian Period," said Rich Lane, director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) geology and paleontology program. "Through this work, we've learned that fish developed the ability to prop their bodies through modification of their fins, leading to the emergence of tetrapod limbs."
NSF, the independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, funded the research.
The bone's structure reveals an animal that had powerful forelimbs, with extensive areas for the attachment of muscles at the shoulder. "The size and extent of these muscles means that the humerus played a significant role in the support and movement of the animal," reported Shubin. "These muscles would have been important in propping the body up and pushing it off of the ground."
Interestingly, modern-day fish have smaller versions of the muscles. According to Coates, "When this humerus is compared to those of closely-related fish, it becomes clear that the ability to prop the body is more ancient than we previously thought. This means that many of the features we thought evolved to allow for life on land originally evolved in fish living in aquatic ecosystems."
The layered rock along the Clinton County, Penn., roadside were deposited by ancient stream systems that flowed during the Devonian Period, about 365 million years ago. Enclosed in the rocks is fossil evidence of an ecosystem teeming with plant and animal life. "We found a number of interesting fossils at the site," reported Daeschler, who uncovered the fossil in 1993. "But the significance of this specimen went unnoticed for several years because only a small portion of the bone was exposed and most of it lay encased in a brick-sized piece of red sandstone."
Not until three years ago, when Fred Mullison, the fossil preparator at the Academy of Natural Sciences, excavated the bone from the rock, did the importance of the new specimen become evident.
The work was also funded by a grant from the National Geographic Society.
Why?
Well since you have to pay to see/hear/view almost everything on that site, my guess would be that he gets some kind of commission.
Why yes they do : )
Evolution still working out reality and eventuallity....or...Human reasoning still lacking.
[Would Nomad see this and say....."Sterilize Imperfection" ? ] 
Worn down..2 Fully erect Hominids succumb to threat and hand over their credit cards
Excerpt:
Greenwich Time is a Lie. Your midday is someone else's midnight, someone else's sundown and even someone else's sunup. Do you know that time is a simultaneous 4 corner square that rotates to a 4 day time cube within 1 - 24 hour rotation of Earth? You are educated stupid and unable to know Nature's 4-Day Time Cube Creation.Almost indistinguishable from some of the creationist material I've seen.
But there's something charming about the phrase, "you are educated stupid".
Yes, if added to all the other evidence collected over the decades.
WHAT other evidence?
Sigh. The other evidence that you are told about repeatedly, and choose to ignore, like the fossil record, modern dating of such materials, DNA links, transitionals, genetic similarities, and BOOKS worth of things that you've doubtless been shown before.
It's all there. The only theory which best explains it without resorting to supernaturalism is the Theory Of Evolution. To date, no scientific theory has even come close.
So, what POSITIVE evidence, besides Scripture, do YOU have?
Are you ridiculing "humans are suckers for a good story ? "..
Turnabout is fair play, I guess..
My comment however is provable..
And some become blowhards like you who can only see black and white in a world of gray. Not much difference that I can see.
Darwin Central will not be happy with this wanton exposure of a small part of the facts!
My point wasn't whether you were being serious or not. My point was that posting cryptic and vaguely insulting four-word responses to a thread discussing a science article doesn't add a hell of a lot to the discussion. If you've got something to say, say it in enough detail that you support your opinion, whatever it is.
The problem is that there are too many people who have no clue about the role of myth and think of it as something merely antithetical to or as substitute for fact or, more narrowly, for scientific data. This is more clearly seen in the political liberal who confuses his conclusions about reality with reality itself. He's just a realist, he thinks. The same is true for many of the naturalist persuasion who believe that what they see is simply the real world reflecting brightly, and accurately, off the shiny surface of their reason. Because of this, both blind themselves to the way myth structures their own world view and the way that world view selects and interprets data.
I'll have to respond with a hearty "yeah, so?"
Getting wordy about the obvious fact that perception is not always the same as reality doesn't do squat to support or refute the article being discussed, or evolution in general. Plus it applies equally to theists and atheists, supernaturalists and materialists, so this little speech hardly adds anything to the debate beyond what was already apparent.
Gaps between... what?
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