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To: js1138
"Did I mention that things without bones or hard shells don't leave many fossils?"

Interesting that you should mention this. Here's what Dr. Chien had to say on that subject:

"When an opportunity came up to talk with Chinese paleontologists and to visit them and the original site of fossil discovery, it became something I had to do. So last March I organized an international group to make a visit there.

"In some ways there are similarities between the China site and the other famous site, the Burgess Shale fauna in Canada. But it turns out that the China site is much older, and the preservation of the specimens is much, much finer. Even nerves, internal organs and other details can be seen that are not present in fossils in any other place.

(Interviewer): And I suppose many of these are probably soft-tissue marine-type animals?

Chien: "Yes, including jellyfish-like organisms. They can even see water ducts in the jellyfish. They are all marine. That part of western China was under a shallow sea at the time."

279 posted on 11/13/2005 3:19:29 PM PST by Liberty Wins (Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of all who threaten it.)
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To: Liberty Wins
And here are the China and Burgess Shale sites in their proper perspective:

Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record

The discovery of new soft-bodied fossil localities is always met with great enthusiasm. These localities typically turn up new species with unusual morphologies, and new higher taxa are built from a few specimens! Such localities are also erratically and widely spaced in geologic time between which essentially no soft-bodied fossil record exists.
You are citing one of the most spectacular instances of soft-bodied preservations ever to justify arguing from the holes which surround it. Obnoxiously dishonest. Might as well say if a young woman named Paula Radcliffe can run 26 miles and 385 yards in two hours and fifteen minutes, everyone and anyone can be expected to do that.

You are playing the usual creationist game of slippery misrepresentation and even more slippery escapes. I'm sure you'd love to be presenting to the ninth-graders in biology class.

283 posted on 11/13/2005 3:48:51 PM PST by VadeRetro (Liberalism is a cancer on society. Creationism is a cancer on conservatism.)
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