Posted on 04/17/2002 9:34:46 AM PDT by Junior
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:19 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Dingell
Norwood
No, I'm sorry. That's incorrect; clintonscumodea was discovered ten years ago.
I had the opposite reaction. A new order implies a greater evolutionary jump than a new species. I see three possibilities:
1) These things have been here a long time and we just noticed them now;
2)God decided to play with our heads by simply introducing completely new life forms out of the blue;
3)They evolved recently from something else, which implies the anscestral species ought to still be around as well so we can finally definitively identify a 'missing link".
Choice 1 is certainly possible, choice 2 is where I would place my money, and choice 3 is bound to cause all kinds of trouble including lots of the requisite taxpayer funded studies to both employ otherwise marginal researchers and conclusively refute choice 2.
Read the article. All these "new" bugs are already dead and gone.
The age of the African examples, now held for study in museums, is not known. The example in amber "is 45 million years old, but you can argue that they are surely much much older," said Klaus-Dieter Klass of the Max-Planck Institute for Limnology in Plon, Germany.
Now, if they had "evolved" into something along the way, that might be interesting.
I think there used to be a Heavy-Metal rock band by that name....
Man, that is a tough question to parse. By "new species," does it mean to ask about species yet to be developed, i.e. species not presently in existence that may come to exist in the future? If so, there are zero on earth that could be discovered at this present moment, even if we could know each and every species at the instant it comes into existence. Or, does the notion of "new species" mean to convey only that no human is aware of past or present existence? If so, there could be many such species.
Then there is the matter of how different it must be before being considered "new."
No real point to my post, other than the question is a bit imprecise.
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