Word: paleontologist
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...Here we go again. one transitional fossil is found, and?presto!?Darwinism is undeniable. Paleontologist Novacek says some people will never be convinced and conveniently ignores the growing noncreationist voices of variance. The fishapod could be a link?or it could be a strange animal like a platypus. Without a worldwide fossil record of continuous transformation and demonstrable mechanisms of transition, it is far from a slam dunk for Darwin's theory in action. Michael Camp Poulsbo, Washington...
Here we go again. One transitional fossil is found, and presto!--Darwinism is undeniable. Paleontologist Michael Novacek says some people will never be convinced and conveniently ignores the growing noncreationist voices of variance. The fishapod could be a link--or a strange animal. Without a worldwide fossil record of continuous transformation, it is far from a slam dunk for Darwin's theory in action...
...shaped bone turned out to be the lower jaw of a fish, but not any fish Neil Shubin had ever seen. The University of Chicago paleontologist had been chipping his way through an ancient rock formation in an icy drizzle near Bird Fjord on Canada's Ellesmere Island last July when one of his colleagues pointed to a wall of red siltstone and exclaimed, "What's that...
...overturned the old picture of the fish-tetrapod transition, which conjured up the image of creatures like the modern lungfish crawling out of water onto land. That picture certainly didn't fit Acanthostega, whose short, flimsy legs were ill equipped for terrestrial locomotion. Rather, according to University of Cambridge paleontologist Jennifer Clack, Acanthostega was an aquatic creature that used its limbs and lungs to make a living in water. And that scenario makes sense because it sets up conditions for natural selection--the force that powers evolution--to favor transitional life-forms like the fishapod, with its funny wrist...
...lack of missing links is still part of the antievolution rhetoric circulating on the Internet. "Some people will never be convinced," says paleontologist Michael Novacek, provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (see box). "But discoveries like this are valuable because there are people who are still undecided about evolution. This gives us an opportunity to educate them." And if not with this discovery, then maybe with the next one. "The fishapod," says Miller, "is one more piece of a rapidly filling jigsaw puzzle. And every couple of years, we put another important...