What's your favorite transitional fossil?

Hi Ron,

Thanks for chiming in. I’m really glad at least one YEC person read my post. Otherwise I would have felt it had been a waste of my time! Glad to discuss this.

Also, I’m very thankful for the helpful comments by @pevaquark here.

Some thoughts…

Critical scrutiny by whom? Non-specialists like the author? Did they publish their ““critical scrutiny”” in a peer-reviewed journal, or just snipe away at it from the safe enclave of creationist websites?

It seems the author of your article doesn’t understand much about the basics of archaeology, because he says that all those fossils were in the same stratum whereas it was actually only stated that they were all in the same site. This is, at best, careless.

Now, mind you, I’m not an archaeologist either, but I’ve done a little homework here to understand the original article, and it all seems fairly clear to me now. See what you think.

Feel free to pull up the original Domning 2001 article to follow along.

Let’s zero in on Domning’s description of the location of the Pezosiren fossils. He gives a very specific designation.

“Locality and horizon: Known only from Seven Rivers (about 15 km south of Montego Bay), parish of St. James, western Jamaica; Guys Hill Member, Chapelton Formation, Yellow Limestone Group (early middle Eocene).” (emphasis mine)

Now to understand this, read this description on Wikipedia, you’ll understand the way that Domning has described the location of these fossils. Quoting Wikipedia:

  • A bed is a lithologically distinct layer within a member or formation and is the smallest recognisable stratigraphic unit. [AMW: This is what your guy should recognize as a “stratum”]
  • A member is a named lithologically distinct part of a formation.
  • Formations are the primary units used in the subdivision of a sequence and may vary in scale from tens of centimetres to kilometres.
  • A group is a set of two or more formations that share certain lithological characteristics.

By contrast, “Seven Rivers” is a location that’s bigger than a group! Yet if you look in Domning’s article, it’s in Seven Rivers — not “the stratum in question”! — that he says all these other creatures have been found. From his introduction:

“Since 1990, abundant remains of sirenians, together with other marine taxa of early middle Eocene age (roughly 50 Myr ago), have been collected from Seven Rivers, Jamaica. The sediments […] represent a lagoonal, estuarine or deltaic depositional environment. The age of the site was determined from molluscs […] and corroborated by the presence of a primitive rhinoceros […]. The terrestrial fauna also includes an iguanian lizard and possibly a primate.”

It doesn’t say all those were collected “from Guys Hill Member bone beds.” It says they were collected “from Seven Rivers.” Domning says that the entire site has yielded all kinds of different fossils, but then he zooms in from that very broad site to the very specific locations where the early sirenians were found.

So what your guy is saying is more like, “All these different creatures have all been found at the Grand Canyon, therefore it’s obviously all a big hodge-podge of bones with no rhyme or reason to it… and they’re all in the same layer of rock.” Well, no — the Grand Canyon’s an enormous place. So is Seven Rivers, apparently, if it’s got multiple groups in it, which each has multiple formations, each of those with multiple members, and each of those with multiple beds, or strata.

And Domning drills down even more specifically when discussing the different sirenians he found in this location (remember, sirenians is a family of animals that includes everything from ancient Pezosiren through to modern manatees). Continuing from above, he writes,

The sirenian fossils are found in five distinct bone-beds within a 5-m stratigraphic section referred to the Guys Hill Member of the Chapelton Formation, and occur as isolated bones and associated partial skeletons, with the remains of several individuals commingled. In the lower three bone-beds, all the sirenian remains appear to represent a single taxon (described here: Figs 1 and 2). These provide the first view of the overall anatomy and mode of locomotion of sirenians during their evolutionary transition from land-dwelling to obligatorily aquatic life.” (emphasis mine)

So what I see described here is that five bone beds here have sirenians. But only the lower, oldest, three have Pezosiren, which is the specific sirenian described in the paper at hand. But if you only read your author, you would think all of this was just jumbled together in a big pit, or all in the same layer.

Let me translate, “It seems quite likely to me.” That means, “As a complete nonspecialist with no firsthand knowledge of the data and not even the depth of archaeological knowledge that you can glean from 15 minutes on Wikipedia, watch me dismiss the careful work of a PhD in geology based on what I guess is probably right.”

And as for what has been found in the Guys Hill Member bone beds, I’ve already demonstrated that he’s actually misrepresenting what the article says here.

So can you find a better take-down article somewhere that actually represents the scientific literature faithfully instead of misrepresenting and mocking it?

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I love it when a YEC argument goes hoisted by it’s own petard.

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@AMWolfe and @Bill_II,

Sigh … Saint Augustine would be so disappointed in @Ron and all the others who speak intemperately of scientific bodies of knowledge…

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Matthew, before claiming that Christian brothers are dishonest and consciously out to deceive, maybe you should stop and think for a minute before going on the attack. [content removed by moderator]

  1. See the following links to reply to some of the others’ claims elsewhere.
    Archaeoraptor: Phony 'feathered' fossil
    Big birdosaur blues

Some thoughts on others’ responses:

  1. “It seems the author of your article doesn’t understand much about the basics of archaeology, because he says that all those fossils were in the same stratum whereas it was actually only stated that they were all in the same site. This is, at best, careless. Now, mind you, I’m not an archaeologist either”.
    Obviously you’re not as we are talking about fossils, not human artefacts, and so it is the historical science of ‘palaeontology’ not archaeology that is apposite. To borrow your own words, this is, at best, careless.

  2. The YEC article stated, “The bones pulled together by Daryl Domning came from five separate bone beds [within a stratum]”.
    The adversarial response was as above. What’s your problem? Maybe not to your meticulous standards of Latin rules, but I’m sure you understood his point, and then zeroed in a mistake of confusing the singular for the plural.
    If that’s the biggest error, aren’t you straining at gnats?

  3. “Let me translate, “It seems quite likely to me.” That means, “As a complete nonspecialist with no firsthand knowledge of the data and not even the depth of archaeological knowledge that you can glean from 15 minutes on Wikipedia, watch me dismiss the careful work of a PhD in geology based on what I guess is probably right.””
    Perfect example of the Genetic Fallacy. Shall use this to illustrate poor thinking to my next set of students.

  4. Can anyone explain to this YEC what a “primitive rhinoceros, an iguanian lizard…and a primate”, along with molluscs, were doing with Pezosiren in a “lagoonal, estuarine or deltaic depositional environment”?

  5. From the original article: “The sirenian fossils are found in 5 distinct bone-beds within a 5-m stratigraphic section…and occur as isolated bones and associated partial skeletons, with the remains of several individuals co-mingled.”
    Comment: Sounds like a right mess to me…but then again I’m no archaeologist, I mean, palaeontologist.

“These provide the first view of the overall anatomy and mode of locomotion of sirenians during their evolutionary transition from land-dwelling to obligatorily aquatic life.”
Comment: How so? Sounds like, yet another, perfect example of evolutionary question begging!

“The following description also draws on several hundred other cranial and postcranial elements from Seven Rivers bone-beds”
Comment: What a disaster! Sounds like one heck of watery catastrophe. What on earth could have caused that much death and destruction? And that is repeated again and again all over the world. What a puzzle.

A quick and completely unrelated PSA sort of comment before I address the substance of your comments separately:

I see that you sort of come and go here, not a regular, but when you next visit, it could be helpful for you to use the “quote” feature. It makes it visually easier to follow, and also then I get notified when you’re interacting with what I’ve said. All you should have to do is click and drag to highlight and then when you release the mouse click, it will say “Quote.” Click on that and it will put it in your response as a hyperlinked quote.

:slight_smile: Touché.

But I will learn from your helpful correction. Will CMI learn from mine?

It seems to me that perhaps you haven’t understood my clarification.

The CMI author Mr. Lamb stated that lots and lots of different animals were found in the same stratum. The Domning article doesn’t say that at all. It says they were found at the same site.

He also stated (as you quoted) that the assembled bones came from five separate bone beds. This again is incorrect. The original article explains that non-Pezosiren sirenians were found in the upper two beds. Pezosiren fossils were only found in the bottom three beds.

So now that (perhaps) you better understand how Mr. Lamb was misrepresenting the data, you can see that I’m not straining at gnats.

Haha, by your reasoning, if a forensic analyst determines that DNA evidence shows John Johnson to be the murderer, and presents his findings in a formal crime report, and I (a complete nonspecialist in forensics and DNA analysis) come along, half-distractedly read his report, misconstrue large sections of it and conclude, “He probably looked at the wrong parts of the DNA code, it happens all the time! It’s all just a bunch of A’s, G’s, C’s, and T’s anyway,” then it’s the genetic fallacy for someone to point out that I have no background in either the field or the particular data at hand.

I don’t think Genetic Fallacy means what you think it means, brother.

Hey, I’ve got to attend to my family at the moment, but I hope to address some of your other good questions later. Thanks for your patience and for the interaction. Sincerely appreciated, even if it’s at times acrimonious.

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Thanks gentlemen. Thanks Prof. Pevarnik.

I have added the place name Seven Rivers and changed five bone beds to three bone beds in my article (Ancient mutant Jamaican sea cows?). Domning’s paper said:

If anyone has a published figure for the period of time represented by Domning’s 5-m stratigraphic section I would be grateful.

The Lambinator has arrived! Your gracious tone certainly makes me feel slightly worse about my string of adjectives describing what it appears you’ve done though I stand by my extreme frustration of phrases that I see are misleading and incorrect in your article. Or your pun of:

Another powerful factor motivating some scientists to build ‘golden calves’ of this sort is the need for evidence to support their belief in evolution.

Maddening for me to read and you to just accuse Domning of building a golden calf to worship in his research. That is certainly beyond words for me to imagine saying that to someone who has just spent years or even decades working on a single thing… being one of the world’s experts in something… and then to be dismissed by a Christian who just says ‘eh, you probably stuck the bones together since I know better than you and you just want to worship a golden calf idol anyways.’ While some folks might enjoy such language, my string of adjectives sums up my response to such writing.

I suppose I’ll ask you directly: do you still stand by your accusation that Domning grabbed lots of random bones and stuck them together? For the sake of… fame or something? Or to somehow And then even if he did, how does this impact all the other papers and research done in the transition from the first land mammals then back into the sea?

I suppose I might as well ask at this point, what is a Mosaic fossil? That to me seems like a term made up by CMI that is used to try and explain away, oh I dunno the thousands of real transitional fossils. Am I mistaken on this? A quick Google search for ‘mosaic fossils’ brought up the CMI archives as the #1 hit and then the Wikipedia link on Mosiac Evolution (which maybe is what you are referring to… kind of?)

Hello Andrew,

I’m surprised and grateful for your response here. I really do consider it a pleasure to be interacting with a creation.com author and talking about data and not just mudslinging (as both sides so often do, including occasionally me, despite my better ideals).

Did you read my earlier post? In it, I talk about your statement that

The stratum in question has yielded many hundreds of bones, including those of a rhinoceros (Hyrachyrus),3 a lizard,4 a crocodile (Charactosuchus kugleri),5 a turtle,5 sea cows (‘abundant remains of sirenians’1), and possibly a primate,6 along with lots of invertebrate marine fossils (mollusks, etc.).7

I pointed out that the Domning article actually describes the presence of all those bones at Seven Rivers, which is not a “stratum.” If you said, “the wider site” it would be better, and true, but still misleading. As I noted, sites are divided into groups, groups into formations, formations into members, and members into beds (strata). Just because two things are at the same site together doesn’t mean that all these animals fell into the same tar pit together or something.

Would you also correct this wording?

By the way, since you chimed in, I took the liberty of tracking down an email address for Dr. Downing and jotting off an email to him to see if he’d be willing to clarify some aspects of this discovery for us. Turns out, he’s also interested in the faith-science dialogue, having written a book called Original Selfishness: Original sin and evil in the light of evolution. So you never know! Maybe we’ll hear from him about his own discovery!

I’m hoping Dr. Domning himself may clarify some of your questions better than I, but I do think I have something worth considering to say here.

This is not question-begging.

  • The evolutionary model says all mammals started on land.
  • We know that several branches of modern mammals are now obligate aquatic mammals. This is observable.
  • This suggests (a deduction!) that they must have gone through a transition from land- to water-dwelling.
  • With other such transitions, we have already found species between terrestrial and obligate aquatic where they lived on land and hunted in the water. (I realize you don’t grant this, but understand it’s part of the model, provisionally…)
  • This, in other words, is a hypothesis that can be tested. Will this hold true for sirenians, too?
  • If so, the transitional form would probably be found around the early- to mid- Paleogene — not too far into the Age of Mammals.

In other words, the age of the rocks in which the Pezosiren was found is an independent criterion that wound up fitting the model when it didn’t have to. The model predicts that a Pezosiren in rocks dated to 500 million years ago would be utterly impossible (no land animals yet) and that a Pezosiren in rocks dated to 10 million years ago would be unlikely (outcompeted by more aquatically adapted sirenians). There’s actually a fairly narrow geological range in which the Pezosiren could be found… and that’s just where it was found!

Do you now see how this is not question-begging?

Hi A.M.

None of the papers I consulted when writing my article mentioned the exposure at the Seven Rivers site of any strata other than the Guys Hill Formation, and you have produced no evidence to the contrary.

I was unable to confirm that the primate fossil also came from the Seven Rivers site, so I erred on the side of caution and merely identified all those different types of creatures as being found in the Guys Hill Member, rather than in the one specific spot (Seven Rivers quarry) within the Guys Hill Member.

Well, it seems you may have dug a bit deeper into this than I presumed. I think to be fair I owe you an apology. And I appreciate your measured tone.

Would you be willing to share a couple of these papers with me here? This is less my doubting you this time and more my wanting to catch up to what you’ve read.

This seems to be a reference worth checking out:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen_Donovan2/publication/267806763_Field_guide_to_the_geology_of_the_Eocene_Chapelton_Formation_Yellow_Limestone_Group_western_Central_Inlier/links/56f3ad8108ae81582bebbd35/Field-guide-to-the-geology-of-the-Eocene-Chapelton-Formation-Yellow-Limestone-Group-western-Central-Inlier.pdf?origin=publication_detail

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@Lambinator, @AMWolfe, @pevaquark

Since I’m a bit late to this discussion, I won’t presume that the discussion has missed some key points. But let me run my list of confirmations that I seek (from either side of the discussion), just to know exactly where we are:

  1. We’ve read the YEC article about the discovery quite a while ago of the 4 legged sirenian (Pezosiren portelli):
    Ancient mutant Jamaican sea cows?

  2. The significance of the find is not that it looks like a Sea Cow, but that it was the much awaited fossil with clear anatomical references to Sea Cows … but with four legs. In other words, in order to establish a credible evolutionary path from land mammal to marine mammal, researchers had been looking for the convincing “missing link” between land mammal (with many anatomical commonalities with non-four-legged Sea Cow fossils).

  3. One of the early articles discussing the importance of Pezosiren portelli:

GEOTIMES, December 2001
Paleontology: Macro-evolution at its finest

"In the evolutionary history of aquatic mammals, sea cows, the group that includes manatees and dugongs, once walked into the sea. It was all the rage during the early Tertiary as intermediate forms of mammals adapted to a marine life. But something was missing in the history of sea cows. None of the fossil evidence till now has shown a sea cow ancestor with four legs strong enough to support its weight on land. When did they make that critical transition from land to sea and what did the animal look like? . . . "

"The find is “most significant,” says William Clemens of the Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, Calif. “It gives us new insight into the origin of the sirenians.” The creature Pezosiren portelli . . . stands on four legs and is a little more than 2 meters (7 feet) long. It is the first skeleton of the order Sirenia with legs and pelvic structure that would have been strong enough to support its massive rib cage and body on land. Today’s manatees and dugongs have foregone hind limbs for a muscled tail and use flippers instead of front feet or hooves. But they still consume sea grasses, the niche that supposedly lured sirenians to the sea. "

"The closest living land relative of the modern sea cow is the elephant. And unlike the great whale debate — where fossil evidence has only recently supported biological determinations that hippos are whales’ nearest living relative (see Geotimes, November 2001) — morphological and molecular evidence agreed about the sea cows’ shared ancestral history with elephants years ago. But none of the sea cow fossils found has had legs strong enough for land, until now. "

http://www.geotimes.org/dec01/NNseacow.html

  1. One of the more recent articles (2010) showing that this specimen is still important to understanding the evolution (“macro-evolution”?) of the Sea Cow lineages:

“Evolution of Sirenian Pachyosteosclerosis, a Model-case for the Study of Bone Structure in Aquatic Tetrapods”
Authors: Vivian de Buffrénil, Aurore Canoville, Ruggero D’Anastasio, Daryl P. Domning
Original Paper: First Online: 26 February 2010

Abstract
"Osteosclerosis, or inner bone compaction, and pachyostosis, or outer hyperplasy of bone cortices (swollen bones), are typical features of tetrapods secondarily adapted to life in water. These peculiarities are spectacularly exemplified by the ribs of extant and extinct Sirenia. Sea cows are thus the best model for studying this kind of bone structural specializations. In order to document how these features differentiated during sirenian evolution, the ribs of 15 species, from the most basal form (Pezosiren portelli) up to extant taxa, were studied, and compared to those of other mammalian species from both morphometric and histological points of view. "

  1. A fairly dry article on a Sea Cow related find in the Pisco formation in Peru (2014/2015):

Bone histology as a clue for resolving the puzzle of a dugong rib in the Pisco Formation, Peru
By: Eli Amson, Christian de Muizon, Daryl P. Domning, Christine Argot & Vivian de Buffrénil

  1. And lastly, a 2017 article that cites the brief article in (5) above:

Preliminary Report of Pachyosteosclerotic Bones in Seals
Irina Koretsky and Sulman J Rahmat
Sulman J Rahmat, Laboratory of Evolutionary Biology, Department of Anatomy, College of Medicine, Howard University, Submission: August 08, 2017; Published: September 06, 2017

Preliminary Report of Pachyosteosclerotic Bones in Seals (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319631814_Preliminary_Report_of_Pachyosteosclerotic_Bones_in_Seals [accessed Dec 19 2017].

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319631814_Preliminary_Report_of_Pachyosteosclerotic_Bones_in_Seals

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I guess the first question I would have is how a scientist can be mocked for finding a “missing link” by actually accusing him of putting a four-legged fossil into the discussion … when that was exactly what he was looking for to show the continuity from four-legged land mammal to a flipper-equipped marine mammal lineage with obvious similarities in anatomy right down to the molecular level of its bones?

@Lambinator, could you re-state your objection regarding this study, or the original author, or of the fossil?

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After a bit more digging . . .

Descriptions of all the geologic units and formations can be found in this paper. The Guys Hill formation and the Seven Rivers formation are two different things, or at least that is how I read it. The paper describes rhino fossils in the Seven Rivers formation but not in the Guys Hill formation. The fossils associated with the Guys Hill formation are crocodiles, turtles, and sea cows along with larger foraminiferal fauna.

From my reading, it is incorrect to associate the ungulate fossils found in the Seven Rivers site with the transitional sea cow fossils found at the Guys Hill site because they are two different sites and two different formations. All we really have is @Lambinator unevidenced accusation that Domning can not tell the difference between ungulate and early sirenian limbs. Until such an accusation is backed by some evidence, I don’t see why it should even be considered.

The Domning Nature paper can be found here.

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In reading the Creation.com article on the transitional sea cow, one has to laugh a bit. The inset on “mosaic creatures” really makes you wonder what YEC/OEC’s think a transitional fossil is. A transitional fossil is a mosaic creature, by definition. Here is the definition of transitional fossil from Wiki:

“A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group.[1] This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross anatomy and mode of living from the ancestral group. These fossils serve as a reminder that taxonomic divisions are human constructs that have been imposed in hindsight on a continuum of variation. Because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, there is usually no way to know exactly how close a transitional fossil is to the point of divergence. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that transitional fossils are direct ancestors of more recent groups, though they are frequently used as models for such ancestors.[2]”
Wiki

A sea cow with legs is a mosaic creature, and it is also a transitional fossil. It really makes you wonder what YEC/OEC’s mean when they talk about transitional fossils. What would a fossil need in order for them to accept it as being transitional? It is also rather strange that they think arbitrary human groupings prevent a fossil from being transitional. If we are talking about the fish to tetrapod transition we only have two groups to choose from: fish or tetrapod. All fossils will be put in one of those two bins INCLUDING THE TRANSITIONALS. Just because a fossil is classified as a fish or tetrapod does not exclude it from being transitional.

It’s a bit like dividing humans into two groups: short and tall. Does this mean that one person can not be in between the height of two other people? NO. The very act of dividing humans into two groups means that intermediates will have to be put in one of two groups, and the line between short and tall is going to be an arbitrary one. The same applies to evolutionary transitions.

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DarylDomning

As the author of the article under discussion, I’ve been asked to weigh in on all of this. Most of the disputed points seem to have been clarified already by others, but I’ll try to clear up some of the remaining areas of doubt.
• The “Seven Rivers site” is a single, artificially-dug drainage ditch in the vicinity of the village of that name. The strata exposed there (in total, about 7 meters of section) are part of what is now called the Litchfield Formation (formerly Guys Hill or Chapelton Formation). This is part of the Yellow Limestone Group, which is widely exposed in Jamaica. The strata in the Seven Rivers site are estimated to be Middle Eocene in age (circa 41-43 million years old). This is close to being as old as any other fossil sirenians in the world, except for Prorastomus sirenoides, which came from another site in western Jamaica that is slightly older (in the early Middle Eocene Stettin Formation, circa 47 mya); it is also more primitive than Pezosiren.
• Of the 20 lithologically-distinct beds or strata that are identified in the Seven Rivers site, several have produced bones, but the vast majority of the bones have come from just 5 layers, as others have stated. Of these 5 major bonebeds, the rhinoceros Hyrachyus has only been identified in the lowest; it and other land-dwelling vertebrates are vanishingly rare throughout the section, whereas sirenians are represented by hundreds of bones. (Turtles and crocodiles are also common.)
• The sirenian Pezosiren portelli is the only sirenian found in the bottom 3 major bonebeds and makes up the vast majority of the sirenian fossils found, including associated and semi-associated partial skeletons. In the upper 2 major bonebeds, the sirenians all seem to belong to a different genus and species that has not yet been named. (I apologize to the human race for the long delay in publishing this new animal, along with an exhaustive description of the remains of P. portelli. These contributions are to form the main part of a multi-authored volume describing the entire Seven Rivers fossil fauna; most of the chapters have been completed, but several important ones are still in preparation. If you’ve ever been an editor of a similar multi-authored book, I know you can sympathize!)
• The key difference between Pezosiren and the later, more derived genus is that the former has a sacrum comprising 3 or 4 tightly-jointed vertebrae that together connect the rest of the backbone to the pelvis and hindlimbs, as in a normal land mammal. The later seacow has a sacrum consisting of only a single vertebra, also attached to the pelvis; the other sacral vertebrae had become loosened from each other, making the vertebral column as a whole more flexible in the hip region. This was a necessary evolutionary step toward the degree of flexibility of the backbone seen in all later sirenians, as well as in whales and dolphins, which all swim by undulation of the tail rather than kicking with hind limbs.
• Several sacra of Pezosiren have been collected from the lower bonebeds, but never from the two higher ones; and no sacrum like the one from the 2 higher bonebeds has been found among the scores of vertebrae in the lower beds. This supports the idea that the later species had either evolved or moved into the area – and Pezosiren had departed – by the time those higher beds were deposited.
• Concentrations of numerous animal carcasses of the same species (or mixed species) are not at all uncommon in the fossil record. As can be seen happening today, this can result from mass mortality from natural disasters, as well as from gradual accumulation of dead animals in a spot where the bones become buried by sediments with little or no disturbance. The Seven Rivers bone accumulations seem to have occurred in a brackish coastal lagoon, likely near a river delta that was supplying sediment. This is exactly the sort of place where one expects to find both land-dwelling, semiaquatic, and fully marine organisms buried together. Carcasses of the herd-dwelling seacows were mostly dismembered; no skeleton was preserved complete, but a few partial ones remained more or less associated (which helps to confirm that, e.g., pelvic bones of a certain type were associated with sirenian ribs or other bones and not some other kind of mammal). When the time comes to analyze accumulations like these, it’s usually not hard to tell whether a given isolated bone is from a seacow, a rhino, a crocodile, etc. – bones of different animals really look different, so it’s generally not a matter of guesswork!
• As stated in my Nature paper, the skeleton illustrated is a composite of bones from different bonebeds but representative of the same species, with a few parts restored that were not found at all – e.g., foot bones, which were logically among the first to fall off a rotting carcass or be nibbled off by the numerous crocodiles. (We only found 3 foot bones, as I recall, but these suffice to show that the feet were built for land and were not manatee-like flippers.)
• Also, no widespread catastrophe needs to be postulated to explain a pile of bones only a few meters across. Dozens of African wildebeests, for example, might drown when a huge herd of them crosses a single river, and the bodies could end up piled and eventually buried on the next point bar downstream. And this could happen over and over again in the same place, years apart or centuries apart.
• Finally, a personal note: As a lifelong practicing Christian, I am always dismayed to see evolution being a stumbling block that divides my fellow Christians against one another. It’s not necessary! I can testify that in my own career, not only have I personally dug plenty of “transitional fossils” out of the ground, but also found that Christian theology makes a lot more sense in the light of old-Earth, Darwinian evolution (with modern updates, of course) than otherwise. Let’s keep it respectful, sisters and brothers – and a merry and blessed Christmas to all!

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Hello Dr. Domning,

What a treasure to have you weigh in here. Thank you for taking the time!

I thought perhaps this was the case, but not being a paleontologist, I didn’t have the life experience to assert this for sure, so I’m glad you said this! Comments like this help us non-specialists to get a “feel” for what it’s like to make a discovery like this when we’ll never get out to a dig ourselves. Thank you!

This too is very helpful for informing how we think about these sites. Thank you.

Let me just take the opportunity to apologize to everyone, especially @Lambinator, for my acrimonious, and mistaken, attacks on this point. The grace shown by both Andrew Lamb & Dr. Domning is humbling to me — hopefully I’ll learn something from it, and my face will be more egg-free in future.

I find it helpful even to know that there are a “vast” number of sirenian fossils in this area. That again helps us to envision this discovery — that it’s not just a bunch of patchwork guesses strung together to make some goofy chimera.

Again, I’m very grateful for your comments — so helpful to us all. Have a merry & blessed Christmas!

P.S. @BradKramer, I’d love to flag this one for some sort of highlight of some sort. Yes, it’s embedded in a meandering conversation that’s not always gracious, but there are great insights in Dr. Domning’s reply that could be really helpful for wider BioLogos’s readership!

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