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.
Just been there, done that. It's the same answer for all of his stuff.
Virtual Ignore is your friend.
That's the M.O. of the disruptors from DesignedUniverse. But everyone's wise to their tricks. But yeah, he'd do it. That's what disruptors do.
Oh my goodness, I am going to die of mirth.
Doubt I'll give it a look this time, though. It's all so yesterday.
Very interesting post, bondserv!
In your commentary you [sic]-ed a whole lot of time references. On my present understanding, there is no reason to argue about the "time problem" here. Plus the time scales described do not appear to be out of line with state-of-the-art natural science theories that have actually been put to objective test, and continue to be profitably tested.
If there is a problem with the present author's (seemingly disgruntled) thesis, you would have to go to motive to find it. IMHO.
When Jaeger says the fossil record is scant, does this mean that he doesn't feel he has an adequate inventory of fossils to test? Or could it mean that he has a sufficient number of fossils to test; but that the test results do not support his theory?
We non-specialist consumers of scientific information seem often quite left in the dark, when it comes to questions of epistemology, the "science" of what we know; how we know it; and how we know we know it.
Jaeger does not immediately appear to be terribly helpful on those questions....
That's not bondserv's commentary. The whole post is a cut and paste from the site linked in the last line. At least he did link the source, eventually.
It's still really execrable scholarship and confusing as hell to just blast articles inline--no preface, no explanation--when you can just quote the important details and link the source. That's just another thing most of the creationists on FR do very poorly. Many of them look like utter plagiarists, not even linking or attributing the sources at all.
Just to clarify, the comments are from the linked site Creation-Evolution Headline's staff. Take a moment to peruse their website. They have been documenting inconsistencies into the theories and methods of peer-reviewed science submissions for three years. When you line up that many articles full of contradictions and discrepancies between reputable scientists, you begin to realize how little we truly understand.
Also they have painstakingly taken the time to categorize the articles by topic. It is a great resource for Christians who are trying to combat Satan's lie that either eliminates the need for a Creator, or relegates the Creator into being a buffoon, who's flawed gentic program is supposedly evolving, rather than devolving as Scripture clearly illustrates, and evidence demonstrates.
As you know, God continually sustains us. The Laws of Nature are only consistant because He maintains them. The Earth remains stable in her orbit only because He set the boundaries of it's course. His ways are beyond our understanding, and the only truth we can or should bank on is that revealed in the Holy Spirit preserved Scripture.
Satan would have us believe nature has some power outside of God, unfortunately many have bit to deeply into his fruit.
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