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.
Will do
It won't be a FR Evolution debate without the man of science VadeRetro spewing insults.
Does "science" support insult spewing?
Care to provide evidence to support this belief?
Your fingers are typing checks your science can't cash.
Care to provide evidence to support this belief? ["Darwin is dead, and has been for over a century. No one will be 'meeting up' with him."]
Why? Did you see him with Elvis at a Burger King last week?
If he won't say it I will!
I feel in in my sinuses, my 'S' curved back, the charming way the bile duct and pancreatic duct are so close to each other that a gall stone in the bile duct can cause the pancreas to explode, the way small kidney stone won't drain out of the kidneys because the duct isn't on the bottom, the clever positioning of the prostate - a little swelling and ruptured bladder, the appendix, the slick way food has to pass over the airway to get to the esophagus, and putting the sewage disposal facilities right next to the playground...
If He was a designer working for me I'd fire Him!
It's a human malady, and keen intellects are poor predictors of an absence of pride.
True enough. At the same time the social structure of science mitigates very strongly against the kind of mewling conformism my correspondent was attributing to "evolutionists". Indeed it arguably does so as much or more than any other human intellectual institution. Whatever the individual failings of scientists, which certainly will be broadly the same as found among any comparable group of humans, science is highly competitive, and it does lavishly reward rigorous dissent.
You can confirm this for yourself, and not just by reading journals. There are many scientific conferences that you can attend as a layman, and even as a non-member of the relevant organization. (For instance the annual AAAS conventions.) Go and listen to a few papers being read. You'll note that time set aside for Q&A is invariable as long as that for the presentation, and often longer, and that the questions are predominantly critical and sometimes almost rudely aggressive.
(BTW, although I've only attended one creationism conference, it was exactly the opposite: 45 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for questions. There was only one creationist at the conference -- Kurt Wise who was hosting at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee -- that I heard to ask critical questions of the presenters.)
Whatajoke, if you think the nature of man's origin is based in fact...please enlighten us....WHAT do you think are the facts of our origin?
I see, smell and hear people in my dreams...Junior, are people in my dreams real?
VadeRetro - you just don't get it. Clearly you are in possession of the data and you are very good at arguing based on your data - but you sometimes seem a bit short on logic and reason - the ability to connect the dots.
VadeRetro, you defend your position admirably so why do you have to resort to stupid insults. "anti-thinking" and other nonsense like that has nothing to do with "science" - it your pointed-headed opinion, an insult. Stick to your data and cut the childish insults.
VadeRetro, you know far more about this subject than I do and I am in no way challenging your knowledge on the subject. I come to these debates to READ - to see how people defend their position - to get insight from people that know more about it than I do. The problem is there is a small group of arrogant evos that pop into this debate and insult the opposition turning these "debates" into little more than food fights.
Please keep your nasty opinions and insults to yourself and stick to the data. You do a fine job when you stick to logical debate, you look like a blow-hard when you spew insults. Hey, it is fine if that is the way you feel but it adds nothing to the debate. I am more impressed when you defeat a position rather than just insulting it.
Actually I want you to support this claim you made "No one will be "meeting up" with him." Meaning you are certain there is no "afterlife". Please bring forth your evidence so we can put this age-old debate to rest.
Don't be silly. Just last week Elvis told me he swore off fast food.
No Mr. Perceptive, I was questioning this statement "No one will be "meeting up" with him"
If you can find no other outlet for your authoritarian urges I suggest you police your fellow ignorami and leave the supporters of science to monitor their own behavior as needed.
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