Fossils Bridge Gap in African Mammal Evolution

Reuters to My Yahoo! ^ | Wed Dec 3, 2003 | Patricia Reaney

[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.

[Heartlander]

I’m just popping in…holidays, etc… The ‘realaudio’ might not work and I apologize.

I’m reading through this thread and would just like to throw this out…FWIW

As conscious knowledge increases, quantum mechanically speaking, must the universe expand?

[Virginia-American]

[puthoff's] experimentally-tested theories -- since they seem to have been confirmed by so many other experiments,

Example or link, please.

Physicist, are you aware of anything Puthoff's done outside of so-called "paranormal research"?

[js1138]

...you would know that he'd already been put through that "meat grinder" a couple of decades ago.

I think the operative aphorism here is "fool me once, shame on thee; fool me twice, shame on me".

[js1138]

That would be the meat grinder episode. Remote viewing and spoon bending just don't lend themselves to serious discussion.

[betty boop]

As conscious knowledge increases, quantum mechanically speaking, must the universe expand?

No, Heartlander, I don't think so. Conscious knowledge increases when we "read out" from what is already there. Only our knowledge expands.

[betty boop]

Physicist, are you aware of anything Puthoff's done outside of so-called "paranormal research"?

V-A, so-called paranormal phenomena can easily be rationalized to (the theoretical existence of) a universal zero-point field. Check out Jahn's PEAR studies over at Princeton.

[js1138]

...so-called paranormal phenomena can easily be rationalized to (the theoretical existence of) a universal zero-point field.

Anything can be rationalized, including a universe in which the surface of the earth is on the inside of a sphere. As for paranormal phenomena, it would be useful to have some that aren't the result of invompetence or fraud. The folks at Duke University spent decades conducting more or less honest research and found nothing. This is one of those phenomena that disappear as the experiments get better.

Uri Geller is a fraud, and anyone who associates with him is automatically suspect.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The existence of Caesar's Palace would seem to challenge the existence of paranormal phenomena.

[PatrickHenry]

No. They just ban all psychics.

[js1138]

But they have to hire psychics in order to detect the psychic customers and bounce them. That's just one of those never-ending battles.

[PatrickHenry]

Yes. And the gambling psychics hire psi-guards to fake out the casino's psychics. I think they all hang out on the Psychic Friends Network.

[Elsie]

The odds of you knowing this are greater than zero.

[Right Wing Professor]

And microtubules-hollow filaments that thread through cells-could act as optical fibres, he believes, feeding light towards the centrioles from the cell's wall.

Considering a microtubule is 24 nm in diameter, and a photon in the blue region of the spectrum is around 400 nm in wavelength, there are certain, em, difficulties with this idea.

[Right Wing Professor]

The existence of Caesar's Palace would seem to challenge the existence of paranormal phenomena.

Uri Geller claims that if he tries to bet on an event, his mysterious powers just vanish. Oddly enough, this paranormal squeamishness hasn't prevented him from exploiting those 'powers' (and thousands of suckers) in other ways.

[KeepUSfree]

So is gravity. We have NO idea on why gravity works - hence it's name: "gravitational theory". However, the fact that gravity exists is not in doubt.
Do you believe in gravity???

[PatrickHenry]

Uri Geller claims that if he tries to bet on an event, his mysterious powers just vanish.

And I have the power to make myself invisible. But it doesn't work when people are trying to look at me.

[Elsie]

HMmmm...

I see..............

[balrog666]

Whacko-thread placemarker.

[bondserv]

You may find this interesting.

Link

[bondserv]

I thought this an interesting discussion of "free will".

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/575617/posts