Posted on 03/09/2006 2:46:21 PM PST by new yorker 77
It has the face of a rat and the tail of a skinny squirrel — and scientists say this creature discovered living in central Laos is pretty special: It's a species believed to have been extinct for 11 million years.
The long-whiskered rodent made international headlines last spring when biologists declared they'd discovered a brand new species, nicknamed the Laotian rock rat.
It turns out the little guy isn't new after all, but a rare kind of survivor: a member of a family until now known only from fossils.
Nor is it a rat. This species, called Diatomyidae, looks more like small squirrels or tree shrews, said paleontologist Mary Dawson of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Dawson, with colleagues in France and China, report the creature's new identity in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
The resemblance is "absolutely striking," Dawson said. As soon as her team spotted reports about the rodent's discovery, "we thought, 'My goodness, this is not a new family. We've known it from the fossil record.'"
They set out to prove that through meticulous comparisons between the bones of today's specimens and fossils found in China and elsewhere in Asia.
To reappear after 11 million years is more exciting than if the rodent really had been a new species, said George Schaller, a naturalist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which unveiled the creature's existence last year. Indeed, such reappearances are so rare that paleontologists dub them "the Lazarus effect."
"It shows you it's well worth looking around in this world, still, to see what's out there," Schaller said.
The nocturnal rodent lives in Laotian forests largely unexplored by outsiders, because of the geographic remoteness and history of political turmoil.
Schaller calls the area "an absolute wonderland," because biologists who have ventured in have found unique animals, like a type of wild ox called the saola, barking deer, and never-before-seen bats. Dawson describes it as a prehistoric zoo, teeming with information about past and present biodiversity.
All the attention to the ancient rodent will be "wonderful for conservation," Schaller said. "This way, Laos will be proud of that region for all these new animals, which will help conservation in that some of the forests, I hope, will be preserved."
Locals call the rodent kha-nyou. Scientists haven't yet a bagged a breathing one, only the bodies of those recently caught by hunters or for sale at meat markets, where researchers with the New York-based conservation society first spotted the creature.
Now the challenge is to trap some live ones, and calculate how many still exist to tell whether the species is endangered, Dawson said.
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Heck of a pimple on its backside.
"Get Popcorn" bookmark
No, not unless it found a magical way to stop all mutational changes from ever happening in its DNA, but there's no rule that things have to evolve in a way that produces large morphological change over ~10 million years, and it's not unusual for that to happen. This is entirely consistent with evolutionary biology.
I prefer my ducks *on* a bun...
And what magic kept sharks and lil' tree shrews from enviromental pressure, or even competition? No magic at all -- what they show is that evolution is not quite de-facto natural. That is, evolution is not an assumed fact of nature. Judge Jones is wrong and so are Darwinists who want purely naturalistic evolution to be a "fact".
Not to mention the poison-pooping bee, which mysteriously seems to have become extinct since 1979.
Why did you respond if you weren't going to answer any of his questions? You asked him questions back that didn't answer any of his. It looks pretty evasive; like the ToE has no answers to those questions and tries to avoid answering them by changing the topic.
Never had a duck samich
Make some popcorn.
Come back later to see thread evolving.
I've seen squirrels team with cardinals to drive off blue jays. Intelligence there too.
When intelligence and design are all around us, how the heck does any sensible intelligent person deny its role in creation?
Is the assumed personal value of not having a *cough* Judgemental G-d that high? Or the pride of selfishness -- without a G-d to feel inferior too, why a proud man or woman, proud of intellect or power can have full run of that pride!
With evidence for evolution all around us, how the heck does any sensible intelligent person deny its role in creation?
Other than my spelling, what do you imagine that I'm mixed up about? The Coelacanth being used as an index fossil? Or the concept of index fossils?
With evidence for evolution all around us, how the heck does any sensible intelligent person deny its role in creation?
By using the brain God gave them??
If you read the research article, you'll find it has changed quite a bit.
ROFL! No it doesn't, except in the way that to you, a truck passing by on the road is sufficient excuse to claim further damage to evolutionists' credibility...
If evolutionists could be wrong about this. What might they also be wrong about?
That cuts both ways -- creationists were wrong about this too. Does that hurt *their* credibility? Give it a rest.
Look, when the most recent fossil of a species is from 11 million years ago, and no specimens had come to the attention of taxonomists in the 200 years that they've been compiling lists of extant species, it doesn't hurt anyone's credibility to conclude that the thing's probably extinct, because that's that's exactly what the evidence indicates. On the contrary, it would have hurt their credibility to keep maintaining that it *wasn't* extinct in the face of no recent fossils and no living (or dead, for that matter) specimens having been found by biologists. They made the most reasonable conclusion from the best available evidence at the time -- no one's credibility should be attacked for that.
Is the fossil record so sparse that this creature could survive for 11 million years without a trace?
Yes, actually, especially for animals which live in forests and jungles, because these are lousy environments for fossilization.
And if so, what other creatures were alive before or after their alleged dates giving by evolutionists?
Probably a crapload, but why do you assume that this hurts evolutionary biology? It doesn't. Research is done on what *has* been found, not on the many fossils which didn't form or haven't been found yet.
Were the fossils of this creature assigned the wrong dates?
No, and your fixation on things which went unfossilized has no bearing on that. Dates are assigned by methods which don't depend on what fossils are or are not found.
Were evolutionists looking at fossils that were only a few hundred or thousand years old, and thinking because it is an extinct creature, that the fossils were much older than they are?
No, and you're revealing your ignorance of dating methods by thinking that it might. I've provided you with lots of links on dating methods on prior threads -- did you not bother to read them?
Was this creature used to date the strata and other fossils like like the Coelanthe was?
I don't know, but that doesn't help your alleged point either way, just as the discovery of extant "Coalenathes [sic]" doesn't undermine the identification of strata by its inclusion of ancient Coaelacanths.
How many other fossils are assumed to be 11 million years old because they were found in the same strata as a rat squirrel?
None. That's not how dating of fossils is done.
And did anybody ever go back and revisit the justification for dates for stata or fossils that were dated based on the Coelanthe? Does anybody even remember how many dates could be affected?
See above. You're misunderstanding how the dating is done, and it isn't disrupted by discoveries of this type.
That's part of the problem that we have with the whole story that evo's keep pushing.
No, the problem is with folks such as yourself who MISUNDERSTAND how evolutionary biology and geology and dating methods and all the rest are done, and keep spreading misinformation about it.
How much of it is based on science?
All of it.
Is that science good or bad science?
Good science.
How much is based on assumptions and evolutionary bias?
None that I've seen.
How much is based on false assumptions like rat skirrels being extinct?
None of it.
We don't know but we suspect A LOT!!!
Thanks for the confession, but don't presume that the rest of us use your method.
It's not the death knell.
It's not even a skinned knee.
God showing up today with a video tape of just how he created the creatures, which ones were created unique and which ones were the result of natural selection of genetic potential in the originals, where the mistakes in our science are, and answering all of the evolutionist's objections wouldn't be the death knell of evolution.
No, because God would show how He used evolution as part of His methods, surprising the heck out of the rabid anti-evolutionists who are denying the clear story told by Creation itself.
Because tomorrow some evo is going to print a story about how mentally retarded palm walking Turkish people are proof that man evolved from apes.
No they won't, but thanks for sharing your fantasies with us. Hint: not even those articles make any claim of "proof". It is, however, as those articles correctly point out, a way to identify one of the genes which is involved in bipedalism, and further examination of how that gene differs from that of the other apes may be a fruitful line of research which might be able to shed light on the evolutionary changes we have undergone as a species. Or it might not -- but it's worth looking into to find out.
By using the brain God gave them??
I have seen little, if any, evidence for that proposition... And I've been closely observing anti-evolutionists for over thirty years now.
Are you saying anti evos have no brain?
Other than my spelling, what do you imagine that I'm mixed up about?
Where would you like us to start?
The Coelacanth being used as an index fossil? Or the concept of index fossils?
Neither. You're mixed up about how they're used and why the process is effective, apparently, because you're under the mistaken impression that finding modern descendants of index fossils would somehow invalidate the identification of strata by index fossils.
I'm saying that I find scant evidence that they use them to arrive at their conclusions on this issue. Indeed, often they actively *resist* using them even when prompted to do so in examination of this issue. It's much more a visceral issue for them than an intellectual one.
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