Stephen E. Jones wrote:
>http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/03/16/tinyprimates.ap/index.html CNN
>... Anthropologists have discovered fossils from two species of "teeny, tiny
>primates," thumb-sized creatures smaller than any other known primate.
>"This discovery reinvents our definition of what the primate order is all
>about and how it arose," ... The fossilized foot bones, each about the size
>of a grain of rice .... At one-third of an ounce (nine grams) -- the weight of
>a couple of pencils - - the smaller of the two is dwarfed by the 1-ounce (28
>gram) Madagascar mouse lemur, the smallest known primate alive today.
[Another `mosaic evolution' puzzle for
>neo-Darwinism which cannot easily explain why one feature is changing
>while the others are in stasis! Therefore more evidence that function
>follows form and not the other way around (as neo-Darwinism
>maintains)?]
Why can't one feature be susceptible to improvement, while other
features are relatively optimized and do not evolve further? I wouldn't
expect a uniform rate of evolution in all features.
This tiny mammal lends credence to the idea that mammals were
here since the Cambrian explosion. Tiny arboreal creatures are
unlikely to be fossilized, and liable to be overlooked, in the perennial
game of which dinosaur is biggest?
--Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@noe.com
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