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.
Could be Cash himself. Hard to tell at this point. But we have ways ...
Fast.
I suppose you never heard of the study of "slow viruses?"
I suppose you've never heard of influenza.
You are the most uninformed non-scientific person on this forum.
I'm guessing ALS.
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Automated Troll- Guard tm notification: |
This one is obvious. Didn't you watch Caveman. Come on. HaHaHa
We all know the stud of the group is always the drummer.
Remember, in creation science an argument from semantics is as good as doing a real study. Somebody said "slow virus," so any desired viruses are slow. Therefore, if the hominids coming out of Africa 120K years ago didn't have AIDS antibodies, that's a disproof of evolution. Any confusion of words or of anything else is a refutation of evolution.
Their entire position consists of whining that their simplistic, and dated, view of a very complex process, evolution, doesn't make sense.
I will not play games arguing over your youthful concepts of evolution, possibly learned from a 'Classic Comics' than I would arguing the accuracy of Newtonian Gravitation.
The problem, dear Fundy, lies not in our Theories, but in your lack of education.
So9
The very mark of the beast. He just couldn't stay away.
Fast skim. Same crap. You've really lost my attention with that one sad-sack guy's empty bag of tricks.
That's the idea. Let the other side dig their own graves. You will notice Creation-Evolution Headlines has over three years of "Scientifically sourced" articles that paint a rather dramatic picture of your friends the "Keystone Slops".
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