Louis Leakey said that the best way to get funding was to give the fossil you find a completely new genus and species name, and explain how it filled a special gap.
I always remember that every time another Australopithicene is found.
Do you have a citation for that?
Is it asking too much to request a link to that statement?
I always remember that every time another Australopithicene is found.
Ah, but re-read what the press release says:
The fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as Au. anamensis, and date from about 4.1 million years ago ...Did you catch that? This fossil was more primitive as well as older than any previous Australopithecus fossil. Yet they're still classifying it as an Australopithecus anamensis. They didn't declare a new species name for this find.The most famous of the Australopithecine fossils was "Lucy," a 3.5-foot adult skeleton discovered in the Afar depression in 1974. Her analytical team included White. Subsequently named Au. afarensis, this hominid, which lived between 3.6 and 3 million years ago, was also discovered in the Middle Awash study area, where the new Au. anamensis fossils were found.
Ardipithecus, on the other hand, was discovered by White and his team in 1992, based on fossils from Aramis, a village in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar rift. White and his team named the 4. 4 million-year-old fossils Ardipithecus ramidus.
The relationship between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus remained unclear, however, because of a million-year gap between these two genera. The new fossil finds, jawbones and teeth from each of two localities, bridge that gap. With Ardipithecus in older rocks and Au. afarensis in overlying rocks, the newly announced fossils are intermediate in time and anatomy.
You know, the debates between those who tend to split the finds up into separate species and those who tend to merge them into existing species makes for an ironic parallel with creationists: While creationists can't agree among themselves on where the impenetrable barrier lies between the "ape kind" and the "human kind", mainstream scientists can't agree among themselves sometimes on where to draw the lines between species & even families. It's those darn transitional fossils' fault. They keep showing up and revealing an insensible gradation between similar finds.
If only the fossil record was so neat & divided as the creationists insist it is. Life would be a lot simpler. :-)