Re: [asa] creation: T. Rex.

There was an interesting article on this topic in last week's Science News. It's a subscriber only article and too long to copy here so I'll just provide a few excerpts. Species that have been discovered to be alive that had previously only been known as fossils, like the coelacanth, are known as "Lazarus taxa". This article shows that these taxa help make the fossil record more credible. Some excerpts:

Back from the Dead?
'Resurrections' of long-missing species lead to revelations
Sid Perkins

In December 1938, Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, curator of a natural history museum in East London, South Africa, went to the docks to look for interesting specimens among the day's catch. What she found one day she later described as "the most beautiful fish I had ever seen ... a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings." The discovery sent scientists into a frenzy.

.The 54-kilogram creature was a lobe-finned fish called a coelacanth. Researchers dubbed it a "living fossil" because the remains of creatures like it had been found only in rocks more than 75 million years old. It seemed that all such fish had died out about 10 million years before the dinosaurs did, yet here was a fresh specimen. And before the century was out, scientists had identified a second living species of coelacanth and had caught or observed the fish in waters from South Africa to Indonesia (SN: 5/5/01, p. 282).

The apparent resurrections of the coelacanth and other long-missing species have led scientists to give such living fossils another name: Lazarus taxa, after the beggar who was raised from the dead in a biblical parable.

In the strictest sense, the modern representative of a Lazarus taxon belongs to the same species that disappeared from the fossil record many years ago. More loosely, researchers apply the term Lazarus taxon to the extremely close kin of ancient apparent extinctions. Coelacanths fall into this category: Although the living species are remarkably similar to some ancient ones, there are no known fossils of today's coelacanths. The same is true of the Laotian rock rat, a squirrel-size member of a group of rodents previously supposed to have disappeared about 11 million years ago

....

And Lazarus taxa may hold lessons for interpreting the fossil record in general. In a broader use of the term, scientists describe Lazarus taxa as a large number of species that seemed to disappear during Earth's greatest mass extinction, to reappear a few million years later, but then to have gone extinct. Some scientists cite these ups and downs as evidence that the fossil record isn't always reliable. However, a new analysis, which considers a broader range of species, suggests that the fossil record may be trustworthy after all.

....

Researchers know of many ancient creatures that apparently dropped out of the fossil record, returned from the dead to thrive for a while, then later disappeared for good. Lazarus taxa of this sort commonly reappear in the wake of mass extinctions, says Margaret Fraiser, a paleobiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

...

Many scientists contend that the simultaneous reappearance of so many Lazarus taxa indicates that the fossil record from that era can't be trusted, says Fraiser. Others suggest that the missing creatures simply became so rare that they weren't captured in the fossil record. Yet others propose that the creatures survived only in small areas and that their fossils haven't yet been discovered.

....

Modern discoveries of Lazarus taxa point out the risks of overinterpreting the absence of a creature from the fossil record.

"It's almost impossible to use the fossil record to define when an animal goes extinct," Twitchett adds. "Maybe it just became rare or marginalized."

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: George Murphy
  To: ASA list
  Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 9:33 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] creation: T. Rex.

  I've always felt that among silly "refutations" of evolution, the survival of the coelacanth is one of the silliest. Of course it's remarkable but there's nothing in evolutionary theory that puts a hard & fast limit on the length of time a species can survive.

  & needless to say, anyone who thinks scientists believe the coelecanth "to be the beginning of all life" has no business saying anything at all about evolution.

  Shalom
  George
  http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Dehler, Bernie
    To: _American Sci Affil
    Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 6:56 PM
    Subject: RE: [asa] creation: T. Rex.

    From:
    http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/11/27/133025.php

    "How can evolution stand up to this? The theory has been proven wrong time and time again. In 1938, a coelacanth, a fish that evolutionists had presumed to live 70,000,000 years ago and to be the beginning of all life, was caught in the Indian Ocean. Since then, hundreds of these fish have been caught and observed in their own habitat."

    Suppose that is correct. Question: What if we discover a group of living T. Rex somewhere. Would that have any implications for evolution at all? Would it prove a recent creation? Would it prove fossil dating was incorrect? Or would it only prove that animals can live on from ancient times?

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Received on Tue Nov 27 22:34:33 2007