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To: VadeRetro
But where's the data point for soft-bodied trilobite precursor Spriggina?

From this link:

Although it is true that one or two of the Ediacaran forms such as Spriggina bear a superficial resemblance to the early trilobites, to date the detailed case for such an ancestry is far from compelling.

Where's the data point for bizarre not-fully-shelled Anomalocaris?

From the link you provided to anomalocaris:

Over one hundred years passed between the initial description of fossil parts of Anomalocaris canadensis and its recognition as a large, swimming predator of Cambrian ecosystems. The long history of innaccurate reconstructions and identifications exemplifies the great difficulty characterizing from fossil remains, Cambrian animals with no apparent living descendants. During that time, there were several distinct approaches to the conceptual classification of the animals of the Cambrian. Initially, Cambrian fossils were typically described as ancient members of phyla that exist today. This early phase of describing fossils in terms of familiar phyla was superceded by the idea of the Cambrian being the setting for the prolific and rapid generation of classes and phyla (the "Cambrian Explosion") that have gone extinct and cannot be classified as members of modern groups. In that phase, Cambrian "weird wonders" such as Opabinia, Hallucigenia, and Wiwaxia, joined Anomalocaris as examples of taxa without modern surviving descendants, and bearing bauplans so unconventional they deserved phylum status. Gould (1989) championed this viewpoint in his book Wonderful Life. In the 90s, the trend has been to recognize most of the Cambrian "wonders" as members of extant phyla, but often representing extinct classes. Hallucigenia, for example, is now considered a lobopod, akin to Onychophora, while Opabinia and Anomalocaris are considered members of an extinct arthropod class (with some workers still suggesting subphylum or phylum grade).

End quote

Is it possible that the reason there are no data points for these two animals is that they have no decendents, past or present, and thus are not phyla precursors as you suggest?

1,458 posted on 10/02/2002 12:22:06 PM PDT by Tares
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To: Tares
Is it possible that the reason there are no data points for these two animals is that they have no decendents, past or present, and thus are not phyla precursors as you suggest?

Actually, we can't know whether they had descendants or are dead ends. They present a morphologically intermediate appearance between taxa which creationists always draw as floating on air, unconnected at the base. Why are we not allowed to infer the obvious? If the later taxa (in this case, trilobites and more generalized arthropods) didn't descend from the fossil species in question, they should be inferred to descend from something related.

Here's a paper that should make you rethink the kind of argument you are attempting, Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record.

Moving further up the taxonomic hierarchy, the condylarths and primitive carnivores (creodonts, miacids) are very similar to each other in morphology (Fig. 9, 10), and some taxa have had their assignments to these orders changed. The Miacids in turn are very similar to the earliest representatives of the Families Canidae (dogs) and Mustelidae (weasels), both of Superfamily Arctoidea, and the Family Viverridae (civets) of the Superfamily Aeluroidea. As Romer (1966) states in Vertebrate Paleontology (p. 232), "Were we living at the beginning of the Oligocene, we should probably consider all these small carnivores as members of a single family." This statement also illustrates the point that the erection of a higher taxon is done in retrospect, after sufficient divergence has occurred to give particular traits significance.
What the fossil record gives you is a rather spotty picture, which rarely allows you to state with confidence that Species A and not Species B was in the direct ancestry of Species C. But it does show that as you go back in time, seemingly unrelated life forms start to resemble each other. Theropod dinosaurs get so hard to tell apart that you can argue whether a species like Caudipteryx belongs in one bin or the other. (There's no problem like that between modern birds and any modern repiles.) The linked paper shows the same thing for reptiles and mammals, fish and amphibians.

There's a tree of life. You can plot every fossil and a separate point, draw a vertical line up from it as though no connections existed, and what you get doesn't look like a tree. But that doesn't prove the connections don't exist. Your ability to lawyer away, misunderstand, ignore, and forget data does not change reality one iota.

1,459 posted on 10/02/2002 1:21:14 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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