Posted on 08/28/2012 2:45:47 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
These 230-million-year-old bugs preserved in amber are the oldest yet
An international team of scientists working in Italy have found the oldest samples of arthropods preserved in amber — a finding that is 100 million years older than previous fossilized samples. The insects, a fly and two mites, are the first ever to be discovered from the Triassic era. The group's findings will help biologists gain a better evolutionary understanding of these organisms and the time periods within which they developed. Amber droplets can be a goldmine for paleontologists. Even a millimeter sized droplet can contain extremely well preserved specimens of organisms that lived eons ago — specimens that can be observed with microscopic fidelity. Globules of fossilized resin can range in age from the Carboniferous era (about 340 million years ago) to about 40,000 years ago, and were produced by plants like tree ferns, flowering trees, and conifers.
The amber droplets, which are only 2-6 millimeters long, were discovered buried in the Dolomite Alps of northeastern Italy. Paleontologists working there were able to uncover about 70,000 droplets — all of which were screened for signs of preserved life.
Paleontologists suspect that arthropods, a class of organism that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, have been around for at least 400 million years.
Two of the arthropods are a new species of mites — members of an extremely specialized group that fed on plants and sometimes formed an abnormal growth called "galls." Paleontologists were surprised to see how similar these mites were to ones still alive today. It's thought that the mites fed on the leaves of coniferous trees that eventually preserved them. What this indicates to the scientists is that mites are a highly adaptable species, able to shift their feeding habits; today, only 3% of mites feed on conifers — yet they've remained largely unchanged over the course of 230 million years.
The fly could not be identified, outside of its antennae, on account of poor preservation in the amber. But what's clear is that flies existed at the time of the Triassic — offering paleontologists hope that they'll eventually be able to find a better preserved specimen.
You can read the entire study in PNAS.
Images: University of Göttingen/A. Schmidt.
Yet they adapt!
Well so much for the successful eaters theory of evolution.
Much ‘wisdom’ contained in those three paragraphs.
Adaptation is the means of survival of all forms of life. The 'blueprints' for the 'forms' have always been there. We are spiritual beings descended into physical form. Our 'form' is 'mammal'. How successful that form will be remains in question.
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Didn’t know that Helen Thomas was THAT OLD!
Pretty cool ATV.
The horsetail weed you can never quite manage to get out of your garden goes back some 350 mya. Similarly long petigrees can be found in horseshoe crabs and hagfish. But the hagfish may be related to all vertebrates as the earliest with its cartilage backbone. All kinds of insects are little changed for hundreds of millions of years. You just can’t improve on perfection, I guess.
I wonder what the “Earth is only 6,000 years old” lunatics who hang out at FR will say about this......
I’ve used that joke many times.
Yeah, that’s what convinced me it was pure Hollywood.
If a real T-Rex had eaten a LAWYER he’s have spit him right back out again.
I never understood why Evolution and Christianity had to be considered mutually exclusive.
If we are to assume that Evolution is indeed true, the next question would be, So who created Evolution?
Or in the case of sharks, they would have left the lawyer alone, due to Professional Courtesy.
They are no more lunatic than the creators of that mythological evolution tail/tale.
Oh just so you know before you akin off, I have NO doubt this earth is very very very old... How old, nobody can state with a certainty. So whom ever planted that 230-Million date on these bugs, is only making an educated guess.
Genesis 1:2 says this earth became null and void and there was one big flood. That heaven/earth age that existed when these bugs did was destroyed. There is NO date given in the whole of the Bible that says when God created the heavens and the earth and how long it took the devil to rebel.
It is amusing in part that The Creator left all manner of evidence of that 'first' heaven/earth age for the modern apes to discover... Chew on that.
Evolution and Natural Selection/Survival of the Fittest are not the same. Evolution has more to with cross species conception and mutation whereas Natural Selection has to do with one species adapting itself to its environment and breeding advantages through survival of the sittest.
Natural selection can be proven in the lab using small cellular organisms.
Evolution is not provable in the lab and takes on a guessing game system which itself evolves into a quasi-religion (Man descended from Apes or both had a common ancestor).
Natural Selection is scientific, Evolution is astrological.
A lot of evolution couches itself in genetic drift and mutation. But this is a guessing game that brings about ‘models’ and rules, that become doctrine and from doctrine comes belief, hence a religion of anti-God religion posing itself as science but actually quasi-science.
The behavior of evolutionists is very similar to the global warming cult. The evolutionists establish a central dogma and post new hypotheses for which they go about gathering information and accepting/rejecting data based on how the data conform with the central dogma. This approach looks scientific in appearance but really it is political and more astrological.
Astrology as a system of reasoning can never be wrong; there is always an explanation in its procedures.
Whereas the scientific method can be wrong allowing scientists to ‘experiment’ and reproduce findings.
Evolution falls in with Astrology; Natural Selection falls in with Scientific Method.
Evolution is insecure, and will co-opt Natural Selection as its own, to preserve an aura of credibility.
But a lot of Evolution is fraudulent just as Astrology is fraudulent (and there is definitive proof that Astrology is fraudulent)
No one is going to stop humans from practicing or entertaining themselves with Astrology because it is an organizer of sorts for some human minds to manage information, although it is a system of false beliefs.
All models are false, some are useful. This is a well-known saying in scientific communities.
Likewise no one is going to stop evolutionists from ‘believing’ in Evolution, nor prevent evolutionists from claiming Natural Selection (which is wrongly said that Evolution encompasses) proves its scientific beliefs are valid.
Had an old biology teacher, if you used the word *bug* in class, your life was in definite peril.
Someone should edit that part of the movie and show a guy holding up a newspaper that says “Obama wins a 2nd term” then cut to Fay Wray screaming.
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