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.
So either God is malicious or "shit happens." And which position is "ungodly?"
I didn't mean I was giving up the argument. Just the flames.
Did you know that viruses evolve pretty fast? Who keeps yelling, "You need to read more?" If you're going to employ such trifling arguments, you invite people to wonder if you're really ignorant or just being dishonest about what you know.
You neglect to say what problems are being asserted. Microbes are among the only organisms in which evolution can be readily observed on a daily basis. Even high school students could observe evolution in a microbe culture. What problem are you imagining?
A lot of others?
Name a second one after 'Piltdown Man'
One practical Joke by students does not make 'a lot'
So9
Am I supposed to believe you're holding out for the aliens now? Or did the CIA "create" the AIDs virus to commit genocide on Africans?
Your tap-dancing is showing.
Is it too soon to start speculating about who we have here? The one-liner disease looks familiar.
Only in some species. Certainly not in humans. And not between species.
You have completely sidetracked the discussion from the argument I originally posted, which is that there are species that are physically capable of interbreeding but which don't. Has nothing to do with size or strength.
The only question is Jesse or ALS. They had very similar styles.
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