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To: VadeRetro
The skulls you posted are obviously highly related to each other. Nobody thinks a coyote isn't a dog. Your post makes no credible issue with fossil evidence.

No? How about these two? Related? Now without cheating and looking at the URLs, tell me what these two are and how far apart they are, both taxonomically and chronologically.




300 posted on 08/18/2006 12:01:54 PM PDT by Antoninus (Public schools are the madrassas of the American Left. --Ann Coulter, Godless)
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To: Antoninus
Those look like crocodylians. But with the 250 million year history of that order, it's impossible to ID them without being able to handle them or look them up.

There are 23 current species and 100's of extinct ones, more if you include similar looking species from the diapsida sub-group.

I'm not sure what your point is.

310 posted on 08/18/2006 12:18:30 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Antoninus
I'm going to say there's a lot of convergent evolution going on there. Overall shape is very similar, the kind of thing you see in a number of shallow water species. The teeth are very different in number and quality. The teeth on the upper one show some differentiation, although Eyes are positioned about the same but nares are on the snout tip of one species and about halfway up on the other. One has a hole in the lower jaw nowhere mirrored on the other. More importantly, the upper has temporal fenestrae behind the eyes and is obviously a reptile. The other obviously is not.

And so forth. I could do even more if I were a paleontologist or what have you, or if it were possible to see what sutures exist and where in the skulls.

Just in general, lawyerly dumbshow of this sort does nothing toward showing that a real scientist can't tell a man from an ape or whatever.

It takes a bunch of "creation scientists" to be unable to agree what's "A man! Just a man!" and what's "An ape! Just an ape!"

Click here to see creationists all over the map on what's a simple variation within ape-kind and what's a simple variation within human-kind.

While we're at it, before you thump every strawman in the hayfield, Click here for why the fossil record doesn't go away as easily as you'd hoped.

For what evolution actually says about taxonomy and the historical tree of life, Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record. Not that it will stop you, but this way I can say I warned you. I know what it says in those links and you don't.

343 posted on 08/18/2006 2:30:27 PM PDT by VadeRetro (Liberalism is a cancer on society. Creationism is a cancer on conservatism.)
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To: Antoninus
"No? How about these two? Related? Now without cheating and looking at the URLs, tell me what these two are and how far apart they are, both taxonomically and chronologically."

Why are you presenting photos without any of the context?

Paleontologists provide a fair bit of extra information about the conditions, placement and ecology that accompanied the original fossils.

You aren't even including a list of diagnostic features.

356 posted on 08/18/2006 6:30:03 PM PDT by b_sharp (Why bother with a tagline? Even they eventually wear out! (Second Law of Taglines))
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