What's your favorite transitional fossil?

:grinning: 

I’ve posted this video several times, but I love watching this video over and over.

Plus everytime they find a crocoduck like here or here.

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Just shoot me now, please.

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That’s … amazing! I must have missed it the other times you posted it!

And Pezosiren makes an appearance! At 1:44! :smiley:

I think I need to maybe run that video at 1/10 speed to fully appreciate it…

There’s a blog post written by me coming up today on BioLogos, about successful predictions in historical science, featuring the Tiktaalik :slight_smile: .

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@Casper_Hesp,

That’s an excellent addition to the “tactical array” of facts…truly excellent!

Having a collection of such articles would be an excellent collection! … for those frequent arrivals who say “there’s no way to test Evolution”.

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haha
I’m glad I re-read your message before firing off a response, as I only saw the wink the second time.
:grinning:

I didn’t know about the acanthodians! I guess I never thought about where teeth came from. Fascinating!

As an interesting aside, there are human genetic diseases that affect the skin and teeth which harkens back to their evolutionary connection:

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Fascinating!

As long as we have fossils set to music, why not some fossil art also? Check out this Dinosaur Holiday Window created by Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.

From a YEC: "This Jamaican ‘legged sea cow’ claim was made in 2001 in the journal Nature by a paleontologist named Daryl Domning, based on some bones he found 15 km from Montego Bay. National Geographic News also promoted Domning’s claim. Both Nature and National Geographic are notorious for their hostility to creation and their promotion of evolutionary frauds and myths. For example National Geographic foisted the Archaeoraptor hoax upon the world, and Nature is forever announcing new transitional forms (recent examples include Gogonasus and Gigantoraptor), none of which hold up under critical scrutiny. The bones pulled together by Daryl Domning to construct what he named Pezosiren portelli came from five separate bone beds within the five-metre thick Guys Hill Member stratum of rock in Jamaica. (Note, in evolutionary thinking, those five metres would represent several million years worth of accumulated sediments.) Some of the bones were found by themselves and some as partial skeletons. The stratum in question has yielded many hundreds of bones, including those of a rhinoceros (Hyrachyrus), a lizard, a crocodile (Charactosuchus kugleri), a turtle,5 sea cows (‘abundant remains of sirenians’), and possibly a primate, along with lots of invertebrate marine fossils (mollusks, etc.).

According to the Nature paper, some of the bones Domning used (the skull and ribs) have features typical of sea-cow bones, while others (the vertebrae, pelvis, and limb bones) have features typical of hoofed land animals. It seems quite likely to me that in constructing his ‘legged sea-cow’, Domning combined bones from different kinds of creature. Remember that bones of both land animals and ordinary sea cows have been found in the Guys Hill Member bone beds. Evolutionary paleontologists like Domning would do well to heed the old saying ‘When you hear hoofbeats in the night, think horses, not unicorns’ and apply it to their reconstructions, i.e. when you find sea cow and quadruped bones, think sea cows and quadrupeds, not mystery new organisms. This scientific principle is formally known as Occam’s razor. Domning neglected to include in his Nature paper photos of most of the bones, including the skull or skull fragments (excepting part of the right jaw). Here is the single photo of bones that appears in his paper, plus the constructed skeleton. I say ‘constructed’ instead of ‘reconstructed’ because reconstruction would imply previous existence, whereas this incongruous combination of bones is probably purely the product of Domning’s artistic talents, rather than the remains of a true species that once lived."

See Ancient mutant Jamaican sea cows? for the pics.

I see. So the accusation that CMI is making is that he deceitfully put the bones together? And no, five meters thick does not have to represent several millions of years worth of accumulated sediments. That for example is just one of many many dishonest phrases that are used in CMI’s article. A clever tactic of YEC is that they try to pretend that any geological process that is rapid is due only to the flood and geologists actually don’t know that volcanoes and floods can rapidly deposit sediment.

Crazy accusation that Domning literally grabbed loads of random bones and put them together. Not not just crazy. Dishonest. Deceitful. Despicable. Evil. You name it. And all to defend the truth of God’s word? And then… they imagine that somehow fighting one paper written somehow refutes thousands of other fossils. Here’s an example of one of many articles of follow up:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.20545/full

Or perhaps just a Google Scholar search for everyone who referenced the original paper.

For example again, here is another study in Nature, albeit from 2015:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3198

But yeah, everyone is probably just playing random bone and gene selector to fake us out.

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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?)