The jaw of Teinolophos trusleri catches the ear bones in the act of separating from the jaw.
Posted on 02/11/2005 6:49:09 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Triple bone structure arose independently in platypus and humans.
Listen up: mammals seem to have evolved the delicate bone structure of the middle ear at least twice. The surprising discovery comes from a fossil, found off the southern coast of Australia, that belongs to an ancestor of the platypus.
Modern mammals are unique among vertebrates for possessing three tiny bones in the middle ear. The malleus, incus and stapes (commonly known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup) work as part of a chain that transmits sound towards the skull. Birds and reptiles have only one bone to perform this function.
Because the mammalian arrangement is so complex, scientists believed that the set-up had evolved on just a single occasion, in an ancestor that gave rise to placental animals (including humans), marsupials and monotremes (such as the duck-billed platypus).
All this changed when James Hopson, a vertebrate palaeontologist at University of Chicago, Illinois, took a trip to Australia. There he met a team of researchers including Thomas Rich of Museum Victoria in Melbourne.
The jaw of Teinolophos trusleri catches the ear bones in the act of separating from the jaw.
Rich and his colleagues had recently unearthed a fossil of Teinolophos trusleri, an ancestor of modern monotremes that lived 115 million years ago. "He said he had some new Teinolophos specimens and when he showed them to me I almost fell off my chair," says Hopson, an author of the study, published this week inScience [Rich T. H., et al. Science 307, 910 - 914 (2005)].
Hammer time
Palaeontologists believe that the middle-ear bones of modern mammals once belonged to the jawbone and later separated to adopt their present location. This is supported by the fact that the middle ear's bones associate with the jaw in the early development of modern mammalian embryos.
What makes theTeinolophos specimen surprising is a large groove in its adult jawbone, which indicates that the smaller bones had not yet detached.
Teinolophos lived after monotremes split from the placental and marsupial mammalian groups. Its jawbone structure, along with its place in the evolutionary tree, hints that a common ancestor to all these mammals lacked the special three-bone ear structure.
This means that natural selection must have driven the same rearrangement in independent groups, after the monotreme split. "Some embryologists had the idea that it might be convergent but nobody really believed this," says palaeontologist Thomas Martin of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. "I was quite shocked when I heard that such a complex morphological transformation happened twice."
The discovery will compel many experts to rethink their appreciation of mammals' common evolutionary heritage. "Until now it was considered to be one of the most important shared derived characteristics of modern mammals," says Martin.
Demonstrate that there's something that needs addressing, and we can talk. Until then, it's all just buzzword bingo.
I believe that you're mistaken.
In addition to the platypus, the Solenodon, a Cuban insectivore is venomous, as well as several varieties of shrew.
So how is you explain Genesis 4:17? Where did Cain's wife come from and who were the people that lived in city that Cain built?
It sounds to me like there were many "men" in Adam's day, but the Bible chooses to talk only about him.
The universe is the creation of God, and it is studied by scientists. The Bible is the word of God, and it is studied by religions of various sorts. By definition, there can be no conflict between the creation of God and the Word of God. There can only be conflicts between the people who study each one.
When the subject is salvation, I read the Bible. When the subject is the creation itself, I study it, and I see Evolution all over the place.
Elsie, you're wrong to fight against a science that has nothing to do with salvation. In the end, your fight will only damage the faith that you believe you're helping.
It's going to be a long afternoon.
Typical, when data is encountered contrary to the Darwininian viewpoint, it is considered lawyering. Darwin seems to be having a few problems lately.
Interesting. So the current guess is, that "mice" were running around on the forest floor, they suddenly grew long fingers and immediately took to the air. Those stupid dinosaurs took eons to do the same thing. Hmm, well maybe the pterosaurs also took the shortcut.
Can you not read?
I said NOTHING about these two items.
I guess I misunderstood you then. Spare me the attitude.
Guesses are for when you have no physical evidence at all, like when you guess that God personally reached down and stretched their little bones right into the proper shape by hand. ;)
Those stupid dinosaurs took eons to do the same thing. Hmm, well maybe the pterosaurs also took the shortcut.
There's lots of way to go from Dallas to Detroit, and I know of no mandate that everyone must travel the same route.
And where is this written?
My point is that the Bible didn't say. Like it didn't say HOW God formed species. Your entire rant against Evolution is merely because you can't find it in your Bible. As you can't find theories of Gravity, or Nuclear forces, etc. etc.
How come you people pick this particular thing to dispute, but not all the other things left out of the Bible?
The creationists have already damaged religion over the past 75 years, far more than I'm sure you will ever accept. It's too long of a thing to explain. And you wouldn't believe me anyway, so why should I bother?
You would, since you have an agenda. Others might infer a common toolkit with common solutions.
This means that natural selection must have driven the same rearrangement in independent groups, after the monotreme split
No, but the methods of transportation were designed.(P.S. drunks fall into ditches, they don't make it from Dallas to Detroit.)
"Not detached" does not mean "partially migrated" in my book.
More details, please...?
Your attempted examples don't coincide with my useage of "lawyering" at all. OK, not everyone deals with dishonest argument all the time.
Mark Furman used the "N" word. Therefore, he planted a bloody glove on O.J. Simpson. At least, Counselor Cochrane claimed as much and most jurors thought it made a reasonable doubt. To me, the point is borderline irrelevant and a clear case of ... lawyering.
A particular site whose articles frequently become FR threads is nothing but a collection of every unexpected result, controversy, or other sour note to be heard in all of mainstream science. All direct quotes are liberally (and rather bizarrely) sprinkled with "[Sic!]" as if a typo had been detected anywhere mainstream scientific concepts (evolution, old Earth, inflationary cosmology, etc.) are mentioned. There's lots of sneering, hissy commentary by a guy who calls Darwin "Charlie." All that is what I'm talking about in one word. Lawyering, then, is seizing on anything but anything to get to where you're going.
We see a lot of that on these threads. The kind of hiccup created by this unexpected find was guaranteed to bring the lawyers out of the woodwork.
We aren't supposed to find anything transitioning into anything else, ever, if some people were right. The thing is, we do. In this case, we found something transitoning onto the bus after we thought the bus had arrived somewhere else.
One thing that happens with more complete data is that when we get the more complete data, we have to revise the story. If you change your story, lawyers will jump on you. Can't be allowed to matter. Science follows the evidence, lawyers be damned.
If we had absolutely all the evidence, a perfectly preserved body in formaldehyde for every organism that ever lived--never mind where this repository is supposed to be stored--we would according to evolution have a record of smooth transitions which outlines a tree of common descent. The traditional problem from Darwin's day forth is that geology doesn't give us such a perfect record and, as Darwin himself noted, it never will.
But with exploration it does give us a better and better record over time. In Darwin's day the state of paleontology was so poor he could cite very little support from that quarter. Things have changed vastly since then, all in Darwin's favor. The kind of confusion raised by the find announced in this article would be cleared up with more fossil finds.
That hardly seems like too much to hope for. The last 150 years have been little but exactly such progress.
Perhaps if the above had been in red, Counselor?
Because I can see the obvious difference between life and an artifact. No one is questioning G-d or Creation. Science is simply looking into the mechanism by which, over millions, perhaps billions of years life evolved. And it did. Why would anyone find such study so threatening?
My quotes were intended to be a humorous reminder of the "When guns are outlawed, only politicians will have guns" slogans--
and going in a progression from Evolution through ID to Creationism.
I'm off to do some winter camping this week-end, so I'm going to chill out...literally. Cheers!
Have a good weekend and don't overchill.
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