It’s yet another transitional fossil, everyone! Oooh and aaah over it, and laugh when the creationists scramble to pave it over with excuses.
What we have is a 23 million year old mammal from the Canadian arctic that would have looked rather like a seal in life…with a prominent exception. No flippers, instead having very large feet that were probably webbed. This is a walking seal.
(Click for larger image)
a, Palatal view of skull; b, lateral view of skull and mandible, left side; c, occlusal view of left mandible. Stippling represents matrix, hatching represents broken bone surface. The images are of three-dimensional scans. The brain case was scanned using computed tomography, whereas all other elements were surface scanned.
What it tells us is that marine pinnipeds almost certainly had an origin in the arctic, derived from terrestrial and semi-aquatic forms — these were more otter-like animals.
You’ll want to learn more about this beautiful creature. There is a website all about Puijila (in English, French, and Inuktitut) where you can find all kinds of images…and you can also find out how to pronounce “Puijila“, something we’re all going to have to practice. Who knew paleontology was going to lead us all into learning a few words of Inuktitut?
Rybczynski N, Dawson MR, Tedford RH (2009) A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the
Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia. Nature 458:1021-1024.
Wunderbar!
Another “hole in the fossil record” plugged!
And 2 more created daveau! ha! Bible-god must be real!
This is one of those unbridgeable gaps. No half-feet, no half-flippers. And it’s god’s whimsy to make things look somewhat like transitionals, which no complexity analyst would ever fall for.
The octopus was too close to count, this is too far from today’s seals to count. Just so you know.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
And two new “holes” opened up. Which means gainful employment for another new generation of paleontologists.
Yabbut what about the creature between this one and seals with flippers, huh? And the one between fully terrestrial carnivores and this thing? Now you have two missing links to account for! See, it’s just getting worse and worse. na na na na nah.
In other science news today, how long do you think it will be until someone claims this here thing must be God:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8007844.stm
And what does “pea-ooh-yee-la” sound like? And why “pea” if it’s spelled “pu-“?
Why can’t they use the international phonetic alphabet to tell us what it sounds like?
ᐳᐃᔨᓚ does look very cool though.
Now there are “walking” representatives of all three marine mammal groups–whales, sirenians, and pinnipeds! Suck on that, deniers!
Perhaps this question was answered at the website but the print is so small I cant read it even with a magnifying glass. The statement that “pinnipeds had an origin in the Arctic” implies they came from an area of cold weather. How do the researchers know that the rocks were at their approximate current location 39 million years ago, and not at some more southerly region and moved there by tectonics?
Gee whiz, just another day at the office for science, lifting the veil on the spotty fossil record. And another transitional form. Who would have guessed…
Just say it as if you were a Hawaiian!
If you can say humuhumunukunukuapuaa, you can pronounce puijila.
Math lesson (again): Whenever a transitional fossil is found, it does not open two more gaps – the number of gaps is always ONE MORE than there were originally. So if there is a fossil called A, and a fossil called I with nothing in between, we have one gap. If fossil E is inserted between them, there are two gaps. If fossil G is inserted between E and I, there are now three gaps, and so on. The increase is always expresed as n+1. So the creationists can keep this up forever. Of course, the gaps will get smaller and smaller and god may have to squeeze a little more to get into them, but of course, being god, he will find a way.
LOOK IT’S A PENDANT!!!!111
THROW ROCKS AT IT!
However Lee, you are correct about the number of gaps, but the gaps are different than the one before. So two new different gaps.
A close friend of mine (scientifically literate; he researches Inuit and Native American skin boats) has visited the museum in Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island (waaaaaaaayyy up north).
One display they have placed side-by-side a skull of a Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) and the skull of a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos). He told me that they are (to a non-zoologist) indistinguishable. The steller sea lion is a sea-going grizzly bear.
This friend has paddled extensively along the coasts of NW Canada and Alaska. He tells me that the Steller sea lions are just as scary and aggressive as bears can be.
This is a cool finding. Amazing how all those data support evolution by natural selection and none of it falsifies it …
Sherry @12
Or: Ha’ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana
Or: Kamakawewoole
The Haughton Crater is around 39 million years old, but the fossil itself is estimated to be around 23 million years old, according to the website of the Canadian Museum of Nature:
http://nature.ca/puijila/fi_hc_e.cfm
TPfD @#10
I think tectonics is slow enough that stuff near today’s north pole is going to at least be in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere 20-40 million years ago.
What the climate is like, besides ‘has seasons’ I don’t know. IIRC, the discoverers think our buddy Puijila was a freshwater swimmer, so it probably needed lakes and rivers that were liquid for a good chunk of the year.
I’m reading a book by Wayne Grady called, The Bone Museum about the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, AB. It got me interested in dinosaurs again, for the umpteenth time since age 4.
I was looking at a book of dinosaurs with my 5-year-old last night and looking at icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mososaurs, etc. (sp?) (he really loves anything about the ocean, got the complete Blue Planet series for his birthday, so combining the ocean and dinosaur fossils just about makes him apoplectic with joy). It got me thinking:
See how many times terrestrial beasts have found that returning to the water has been a good way to make a living. It’s happened over and over and over since vertibrates emerged from the water. It’s one of Dennett’s “good tricks”, given the right opportunity. I also find it interesting that only the mammals “do it” up and down, while all other vertibrates swim with a side-side motion. Mammals must have altered the spine in such a way that going back to side-side didn’t happen. (Although otters use their tails side-side and seals seem to use their hind flippers side-side sometimes.)
I saw this on Canada AM this morning…I enjoyed the story of how they found this fossil. They went out to an area where lots of fossils had been found before, but didn’t find anything. On their way back home their vehicle ran out of gas. While the driver was off to fill up the gas tank, one of the geologists/anthropologists(?) went off with a student and happened upon the bones! We wouldn’t have this cool find if it weren’t for the car running out of gas. Thought you might enjoy that!
They’ll keep asking for ‘just one transitional fossil’, though. Evidence doesn’t mean a thing to creationists, that’s why they’re creationists.
Re: my comment @19:
I was using the name “dinosaur” very loosely. Some of those are dinosaurs, some aren’t. But it’s all the same to a 5-year-old. Or a 5-year-old in his 40s who doesn’t have to be too technical about it.
I prefer to pronounce it as the French word for “seal”–Phoque.
See this song about a lonely seal from Alaska:
Proper pronunciation at :22
Dam that is cool. I bet Neil Shubin heard and and cursed loudly.
n
In other science news today, how long do you think it will be until someone claims this here thing must be God:
If they want to claim that God is a Lyman Alpha blob, I’m totally down with that. Might require a change in the liturgy however.
It has already started. A creationist on the YouTube site for this video claims that sceintists throw away all of the fossils that don’t support creationsism.
Whoops, none of those listed are …
Linky? Because that is some grade a stupid.
Thank you.
*nods approvingly*
Part of the fun will be reading Casey Luskin’s response.
What’s really funny is AIG’s response to the “hobbit” (homo floresiensis)
“But the use of fire, tools, and hunting are clear indications that they were intelligent humans descended from Adam through Noah. It is possible that, like Neanderthals and the so-called Homo erectus, the genetic information that coded for these hobbits’ skeletons has likely been lost or diluted over time.”
I expect to see similar contortions over the four legged seal
Every fossil is transitional, unless it is the lat of its kind. :)
Well of course we do. Except that it turns out that all of the ones we keep support creationism, too. Like archaeopteryx, which is, after all, just a bird.
It’s a vast conspiracy to make creationism look implausible. The trouble is, we’re absolutely no good at it, since all of our evidence points toward design.
We’re super-competent, and completely incompetent [unless, god forbid it to be said, everything fits the current “design hypothesis”].
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Yeah, but no, but yeah, it’s still just a form of walking seal…wait.
Ahem.
PZ wouldn’t do this if it was a Muslim fossil…wait.
Ahem.
[I’m all out and this isn’t quite as funny as originally imagined]
Way cool.
Hey Creationsists, we got your Puijila right here! And it has an evil darwin(i) on the end. Suck on that.
Damn, another transitional fossil.
Now there are two more gaps for creationists to complain about.
j/k
From the sidebar on the About the Name page: “The Puijila specimen is affectionately known as Bacon.”
Tee-hee.
Even the last individual of the species is “transitional” toward something. Everything evolves until it dies.
That means that seals are currently under the same process of returning to sea as whales were millions years ago. Talk about a living transitional form!
Must. contain. myself.
That may be the coolest thing every in paleontology.
*as far as I’m concerned at least.
Like Wim wrote @ 17 the crater is 39 myo, which would be Middle Eocene, the deposit where the fossil was found is much younger, Early Miocene ~23 My. This makes Puijila darwini, morphologically, the best candidate for the common ancestor of pinnipeds.
wrong, madscientist. There is nothing to guarantee that they aren’t going to stay this way for a long time, or evolve back into land mammals or whatever.
ever not every
hard time containing my fingers because of the bacon
Sounds a bit too close to teleology for my taste, though I don’t suppose you intended it to do so.
Actually, the individual simply does not evolve, hence the last individual of a species would normally be considered not to be transitional, mainly because it didn’t act as a “transition” to anything. In a way, I’d say that it “could be” in some fictional scenario (if the species hadn’t died, it would have evolved), but more so, I’d say that relative stasis confounds the notion of transitionals.
Yes, in the most absolute sense of evolution, even a species in relative stasis is comprised of “transitional forms.” The trouble is, that’s not what we usually mean by “transitional forms.” We don’t find a wolf skeleton from 10,000 years ago, and call it a “transitional form.” We’d have to find something between the relative stasis of the past couple million years ago, or so, and what came before that, for the more usual meaning of “transitional form” would be invoked.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Ahnald Brownshwagga the Monkey@42: wrong, madscientist. There is nothing to guarantee that they aren’t going to stay this way for a long time, or evolve back into land mammals or whatever.
That is why I wrote “currently”.
Tom Coward #27
Glen D #34
Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do…
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do, we do…
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Gutenberg…a star?
We do, we do…
Who robs cavefish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do….We doooo!
()
<L=L>
I’m terrible at ASCII art but you can maybe see what I’m getting at.
I couldn’t see anything on the site, does anyone know the history of the Inuktitut script? it looks quite funky. The BBC had a piece on this yesterday, I was wondering if PZ was going to cover it.
My understanding is that the pinnipeds are most closely related to bears, out of the current extant fauna anyway.
OT but: What to get the guy who has everything?
http://www.squishable.com/pc/squish_octopus_15/Big_Animals/Big+Squishable+Octopus
It’s yet another transitional fossil, everyone!
But there aren’t any transitional forms in the fossil record. And what about Piltdown man? And how do you explain PYGMIES + DWARFS??????????????!!!!111ONE!!??
I might stick with this one even if PZ goes
back to typekey registration.
Sorry, but this is sooo much better than my last OT link. Well on metatopic, tho.
http://www.splitreason.com/product/737
Glen Davidson #44
You’re absolutely right about it sounding too teleological. Richard Dawkins addresses this point at the beginning of his book, “The Ancestor’s Tale”. It’s something hard to escape, but you’re right that it should be avoided.
There is quite a lot of information tucked away on this part of the nature.ca site, including answers to several points raised in the comments so far, such as the climate and geography of the Early Miocene there.
One of the more intriguing pages is http://nature.ca/puijila/fb_3d_e.cfm where 3-D Flash images can be rotated.
Any anatomists care to enlighten me on those sternum-like bones?
Strange that no-one else here has raised the issue of the baculum…
The concept of transition is flawed in another way.
Consider that genetic accidents – birth defects – can significantly alter our morphology in one generation. For example, sometimes humans are born with fused skin and/or bone of the digits (syndactyly). From life’s point of view, it’s simply an alteration that may or may not be beneficial (at least for kangaroos, it’s an advantage) In either case, there need not be transitional forms because parents with normal hands/feet/paws had offspring with significant morphological changes due to the recombination of genes through sex.
And this is really happening out in the world. It was recently discovered that wolves on Isle Royale, a remote island in Lake Superior, have congenital bone deformities because of extreme inbreeding. At least one exhibited syndactyly features. Although not likely, it is possible that such paws could be an advantage if the wolf hunted for fish in the shallows of the lake. Not so strange when you think about the origin of whales and dolphins.
JBlilie @15
Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island is only about 110 miles directly north, if you drew a line west from the Canadian US border out into the ocean. This site is about 1,815 miles north of the border. That is up north.
There is also the Mars project in the same area with the space agencies, which even has a web cam.
http://www.marsonearth.org/about/devon.html
( am occasional poster, previously under RossM, but someone recently used it with TypePad and posted April 17, which was not me, hence the change)
Lee Picton #13: Your math is correct but your semantics aren’t. There is net only more gap, but two new gaps are created, as neither of these gaps is the same as the previous old gap, which has now been filled. (Thus, n(gap) – 1 + 2)
(GigaGapicus, patron deity of the gaps, is typically represented by idols carved from dry ice, which slowly sublimate away. Most of them are pretty puny, these days, but it has been said that once, the grandest weighed in at several tonnes each)
Sorry @56 did not show the link to click on:
http://www.marsonearth.org/about/devon.html
There are maps with lots of interesting info.
Damn. When I read that comment after submitting it, I predicted it wasn’t going to be taken as intended.
The point of comment #38 was to tweak Abdul’s comment #33, which I read as implying that the mechanisms of evolution “view” or “treat” the last individual of a species differently than they “view or treat” any other individual of that species. I wasn’t talking about stasis or not stasis, nor trying to imply that individuals evolve. I was just trying to clarify that the last individual of a species isn’t acted upon any differently by evolution than the members which had lived say 20 years earlier or 100 years earlier. The processes “treat” them all the same (yes, this is terrible phrasing). Evolution doesn’t “stop” just because the species is sitting on the precipice of oblivion. The mechanisms are not “aware” that the species is about to go out, so they don’t just “leave the species alone” after it (the species) passes some extinction event horizon. Species evolve until they die.
On this page
http://nature.ca/puijila/fi_e.cfm
the palentolotrix is wearing some huge techno sunglasses. Are those just funky-disco Canadian accessories, or are they some kind of hot fossil-finding x-ray specs, and where can I get some?
ice
“Does anyone know the history of the Inuktitut script”
If only there a website where you could type those words and “search” the internet for the inform-
oh, okay, enough snark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics
Now what I really want to know is:
Did this creature live on Noah’s Ark, or did it swim along beside it?
Peter @48, Pete @61
Go to: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/inuktitut.htm
for an explanation of Inuktitut script. There is even a link to download fonts in case you want to post something.
Apologies for drifting off topic, but a few people have expressed curiosity.
The Inuktitut writing system is called “syllabics” by its users, because each character usually represents a whole syllable. The shape of the character tells you the first consonant in the syllable, and the orientation of the same character gives the immediately-following vowel. That’s why the name pu-i-ji-la has only four characters.
The system was originally invented for the Ojibwe language by missionary James Evans.
I have no idea why the name, which is clearly spelled pu-i-ji-la in both Roman and Inuktitut, is pronounced pi-u-ji-la in the soundbyte. Perhaps we are dealing with dialect differences here.
RMM Barrie@63,
Like I did up at comment#8?
(a) the fossil is great. Putting that Darwin quote about evolution of aquatic animals on the name page- that’s just _rubbing it in_. I approve :)
(b) between Tiktaalik (freshwater fish) and Puijila (young seal), pretty soon everyone interested in paleontology will be able to go to Canada and order one hell of a barbeque.
(c) that shape-and-orientation scheme for the syllabic script is really, really clever.
@10 A good explanation of ‘how’ they can reconstruct paleoclimate and paleo-ecosystems can be found:
Mathews, J. V. jr. 1979. Tertiary and Quaternary Environments: an historical background for the analysis of the Canadian Insect fauna. pp.32-85 in Canada and its insect fauna, Mem. Canada Entomol. Soc. 108.
This, although a bit dated, is a very good explanation of the floral and biogeographic history of the North American flora and some faunal elements. Any university library should have it.
I saw this on BBC world news last night. On my news feed it said “seal ancestor once walked on land” to which I thought no shit.
Human ancestor once budded asexually like a yeast.
Pete @65
My reference was for Inuktitut script and syllabary, which is a different link than the link provided by PZ. As to why the Canadian Museum of Nature did not use the international phonetic alphabet, I do not know. Playing the pronunciation it also does sound like “pu”. Typo, or they were hungry at the time, I guess. Let me know if I am missing something in your point, as I am not totally sure if understand.
If you want to get semantic; you have not “filled” the old gap, you just split it in two. Previously there was a gap between species A and species B, when we put creature C between A and B, there are now two gaps between A and B where previously there was only one. So it is not really correct to say we elimnated the “old” gap and created two “new” gaps. The old “gap” is still there but split into two smaller gaps. Imagine stepping-stones across a stream. At first they are far apart, so we find a new stone and drop it between two of the exisitng ones. The new stone doesn’t fill the gap, it just splits the previous gap into two smaller ones.
In reality there is not “one” gap between two species, there is an unknown N species (“gaps”) between them, finding one doesn’t create a new gap, it fills one out of the N “gaps”.
Doesn’t it worry you guys that you’ve put ten times more effort into this thread’s gap argument than the creationists ever did? :)
Anyway, if there are N species between A and B then there are clearly N+1 gaps… except now you’re not discussing _gaps_, you’re dicussing _slots_ and finding a species fills a _slot_ but…
(help, the tentacles have got me)
Why would we want to throw rocks at a hanging ornament?
Re Skemono @73;
It may be a Pinyata?
SteveM #71: Now you’re getting too complicated for my poor little brain. I was simply referring to “gap” as defined by its boundaries. Hence Gap (A-B) now has become Gap (A-C) and Gap (C-B), and both A-C and C-B are not the same as A-B, which does not exist anymore. Any number of unknown species N could be in any gap, since by definition a gap is any empty space into which you can put any number of unknown entities.
Except, of course, that there isn’t actually to my knowledge an agreed upon definition of gap (unless the Creationists have produced one).
Note the rifle barrel on the back of the you woman in the discovery photos at the nature.ca web-site. That’s for the polar bears. Up here palaeontologists need to go armed!
CBC story
Nah, they just need a hobbled creobot or two. After all, evolution only says you need to be faster than the slowest other prey. Then the creobot herd gets thinned at the same time. Win-win :-).
I have met the survivor of two polar bear attacks. He is ripped up. You don’t joke about that up here, because polar bears can kill a whole family, then start eating.
Oh, and babies tend to be slower than adults. Another reason polar bear attacks are not evolutionary, simply deadly.
However, adults protect and carry babies. Healthy, fit, and smart adults almost certainly do a better job of it, statistically.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
I’ve done fieldwork in the arctic. You do want to have a firearm or two around.
JohnnieCanuck @54
Seems you are not going to get an answer on the sternum bones, I cannot help, so I think it best if you email Gary Goodyear MP or Jim Lunney MP as both a chiropractors. I am emailing to ask if they have learned anything yet about an older earth of a different sort of creation.
I read a mystery series set in Alaska. They take a shotgun to the outhouse. Human-ursine relations need to be respected.
No shit?
I love it when people are put back into the food chain…
Josh, try Breakup by Dana Stabenow. A couple of nice bear stories, along with a semi-comic mystery yarn.
Will do, Nerd. Checking Amazon now. Danke.
I’ve done fieldwork in the arctic. You do want to have a firearm or two around.
did you ever work with the guys that do the sat/radio tagging of polar bears?
I met a couple who told me some amazing stuff about the tenacity of mother polar bears.
short version:
Sometimes the mothers wake up when you take their cubs from the winter dens to tag them.
It just gets really messy from there.
Nope. It was all rockjock stuff. The rifles were there simply to protect us from the polars. I’ve thankfully never been anywhere near a mother bear (of any flavor) and her cubs.
Yeah.
“I just love these things. Crunchy on the outside with a soft chewie center.”
You know, the whole counting-the-gaps thing is sort of silly from a phylogenetic perspective. Any given fossil species with a morphological trait “intermediate” between two other fossil species is extremely–vanishingly–unlikely to be from a population that was actually on the lineage of either one. These are intermediate morphological grades, with respect to some characters but not to others. They are from various extremely numerous branches, not a single univariate series.
I think this is part of the reason why our hill is so steep with respect to evolution education. This is a fairly complex and subtle subject that I don’t think is all that user friendly. And the means by which we study it doesn’t help in terms of communicating it.
For example, use a cladogram as a teaching tool and it’s easy to tacitly project the idea that all of the branch nodes are actual ancestral taxa. In fact, I’ve found it difficult to explain that this is not the case.* And there’s a ton of other landmines involved in communicating this subject. I think evolution would be tough even if we didn’t have the creotards and IDiots to contend with.
*We could explain that away as me being a shitty instructor, of course.
“I just love these things. Crunchy on the outside with a soft chewie center.”
http://oswego.edu/student/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/penguins_polar_bear1.jpg
Here is a chart of Inuktitut syllabics. Just to confirm that it’s really written Puijila on the website, even though both the pronunciation guide and the soundfile say Piujila. ~:-|
The font size is entirely unremarkable. You should get glasses and/or hit [Ctrl]-[+].
No, it implies they came from the Arctic, the region up north.
The climate appears to have been temperate, except of course that it had polar day and polar night.
Because continents are easy to track. Basically all you need is rock containing certain common iron minerals. We know where North America was in the early Miocene: a bit east and north (!) of where it is today.
(70 million years ago, the Alaskan north coast was just off the North Pole.)
Indeed.
When a new fossil is discovered, one gap is split in two, and another entirely new gap is added. Makes, in sum, two new gaps.
Here goes. A is an ancestor, B a descendant, and C is the new fossil:
becomes
The gap between A and B is split in two, and the gap between x and C is added. There was one gap, and now there are three: makes two new gaps. Quantum electrodynamics, I mean, QED.
It is very rare, at least among vertebrates, that C actually is x. Fossilization isn’t such a common event, and the diversity of life has been very high for a very long time now. Puijila is not an ancestor of anything known, for example.
I suggest looking at the teeth.
Ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs… and vertebrates. :-)
Pretty much always.
Whale-style up-down wagging is the same as galloping. In the natural history museum in Vienna there’s an animation of a running cheetah and a swimming dolphin; it’s stunning how identical their motions are (as far as applicable).
Paleontologists. Or paleobiologists even. :-)
That is most of the sternum. That’s what it normally looks like in mammals, for (presumably) some reason. In us, they’re fused.
I must say it’s an enormous issue.
The former. :-)
Like Schizosaccharomyces pombe (ordinary cell division), not like Saccharomyces cerevisiae (actual budding from one end).
Because they themselves don’t know it? Nobody except l33t linguists (and people who’ve spent more than 3 hours in the relevant part of Wikipedia) knows it. It’s not like it’s normally taught in highschool.
Ironically, however, it would simply be [pʊijila] respectively [piʊjila] in this case…
Wow, that must be a new outhouse.
oh, and someone did a nice photoshop job of the original you quoted:
http://rookery2.viary.com/storagev12/926500/926835_e821_625x1000.jpg
Frickin’ excellent! I’d never seen that one before.
…er make that the original I posted.
*goes to look for more coffee*
Oh shut up :)!
Badass.
So what? Since when can anyone outrun a bear in the first place?
It is the case, or rather, it’s hypothesized to be the case (a cladogram is a phylogenetic hypothesis). Every mathematical point on a cladogram symbolizes a population.
What is not the case, except very rarely, is that we actually know a representative of such a population, except at the tips.
Oh, Pete, you really have to point them at lmgtfy.com.
Like this.
LOL
David, did you notice that this thread comes up as the 3rd most popular link when you do that search?
You get a point for that one, Josh.
Oooo. My childhood drawing of a seal with arms and legs is finally vindicated! There *was* such a beast! Can anyone point me to whale ancestors which don’t have such vestigial legs? How about a duck ancestor with 4 legs – that would make people stop laughing at my artwork.
Yeah, sorry. I explained that poorly. Actually, that was a full on brain-cramp. I was trying to talk about nested clades. I think it’s difficult for people to not start thinking that species depicted in a clade as being directly ancestral to the species in clades that are nested within them.
Can anyone point me to whale ancestors which don’t have such vestigial legs? How about a duck ancestor with 4 legs
yes, but how far back do you want to go?
you can easily google up the fossil series wrt whale evolution (wasn’t there even another recent find?), and find nice pics of critters like ambulocetids.
as far as birds go, I think you’ll have to go back to a MUCH earlier common ancestor before you get to a four-legger.
Obviously this ‘fossil’ is a modified skeleton of an otter
You biologists are really getting desperate with your lies
I must admit that when it comes to the gaps, I was thinking only of the math involved, and did not consider the nature of the gaps themselves. If there is an original gap between A and C, it would have certain characteristics. When that one gap has B inserted in the middle, you guys are right – even though the net number of gaps has only increased by one – the new gaps represent something different than the original gap. Now we need a definition of “gap.” Are we all happy, now?
David M said
Huh? All of the stuff I read back in the 80’s and early 90’s insisted that a cladogram per se was just a dichotomous directed graph connecting the OTUs, an ‘atemporal synapomorphy scheme’. To interpret it as a phylogenetic tree (where the stems actually do symbolise populations through time) involved
a transsubstantion ritualconversion process (rooting, collapsing zero-length branches…). It might still look exactly the same but you can’t call it acrackercladogram anymore…This sort of obsessive distinction was of course part of the debate over ‘pattern cladism’, so it’s not completely silly. Sometimes we really do find ancestors (probably) and very often a branch length can’t be distinguished from zero, but they’re not the same set of cases.
On the About the Name page is this, which I and the Rev. BDC and many others welcome with watery mouths:
The ATV reference escapes me unless that is the means to bring home Puijila.
Mmmmm. Bacon!
Fascinating. Does this throw any light on the mystery of the Baikal seal? When I was there last year, the guide at the museum reckoned that the Baikal seal either evolved there or swam up one of the rivers from the Arctic Ocean (Lake Baikal is in the middle of Siberia, hundreds of kilometres from the ocean, at an altitude of at least 500 metres). I didn’t like either of these two hypotheses, and a Russian biologist I questioned rapidly changed the topic. Has anyone looked at the “molecular clock” to calculate when the various families of seals diverged, and whether it is feasible for the Baikal seal to have evolved there? Or was there another connection of Lake Baikal with the sea (I still find it implausible that a seal would voluntarity swim hundreds of kilometres upriver)?
Mmmmm. Baculum!
That’s the correct Latin diminutive from Greek βακον, isn’t it?
hmmm…. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a Baikal Seal. must look it up, now. I wonder how long it’s been living there, too.
Thinking about fossils known as bacon reminds me of some other benefits of this type of find.
1-More knowledge.
2-More clarity and understanding.
3-A more detailed picture of biological history.
4-More gaps in the fossil record filled in.
5-More consternation, sputtering, sandbagging and whining from certain camps.
6-If the previous 5 are all bacon, then
7-Much more bacon.
And throughout the land the people were occupied with discovery and connections, pausing from time to time to enjoy a bit of old dead pig. Renewed and invigorated, they return to learning, enjoying the savor on their palates as well as in their minds.
If that ain’t bacon then we ain’t shakin’.
This is no probem at all. Easily plausible.
In northern Australia, saltwater crocodiles and tiger sharks can swim hundreds of kilometres upriver in a good wet season. Not much altitude gain, though.
Baikal was a fair way from the edge of the ice sheet, but I wonder if there may have been pretty large bodies of water covering much of that space in parts of the Pleistocene. It wouldn’t take a big sea-level rise or a very high ice dam to put most of Siberia underwater (I flew over that part of the world once, the middle leg of Sydney-KL-Tokyo-Paris-Frankfurt, and the glare reflected from a million circular lakes was blinding). That brings more typical seal habitat much closer to the lake, yes? Rather than separate (convergent?) evolution of the Baikal seal, or Baikal being the origin of all seals, or a unique upriver dispersal, it may be that it’s a relict of a formerly widespread species. Someone could probably check that. :)
Re: Seals swimming upstream and gaining a fair amount of altitude:
Well, a seal is mobile in water and on land. They are certainly well equipped to travel farther in and further up. (Or is it further, farther?)
Like humans, they can portage.
One individual need not make the whole trip. Progeny born on the trip could continue or finish.
*never ending story*
I have no idea why the name, which is clearly spelled pu-i-ji-la in both Roman and Inuktitut, is pronounced pi-u-ji-la in the soundbyte. Perhaps we are dealing with dialect differences here.
There are. In some varieties of Inuktitut “j” is pronounced like “y”, in others “jy” and in others “j”.
Well, actually I should say the phoneme, transcribed into Roman orthography, sounds closest to those.
No, they don’t. It might sound like that to you, but I doubt you hang around Inuktitut speakers very much. I do, and I can make it out clearly.
The syllabics are (written in Roman orthography) pu-i-ji-la,
pronounced poo-ee-yee-la.
About pinnipeds swimming up river.
ATVs (otherwise known as four-wheelers) are a mainstay of travel in the Arctic summer. Just about any major camp (such as the Mars Houghton Project) will have them.
Oh c’mon. That is easy. A gap is where the creos stick their god. Who has been moving a lot lately seeing as he can be evicted by a fossil or two.
This is of course, controversial. Many claim that he has gotten tired of being called the god of the gaps and retreated behind the Big Bang.
I am amused to see the word “creature” used on this website, a site that is profoundly anti-creationist. I also see it elsewhere, including the magazines Science and Nature.
Creature stems from the late Latin word creatura, and in Middle English it was used to refer to something created.
Huge problem up north in the Columbia and other rivers. The sea lions like to hang out at openings of the fish ladders at dams. They eat a lot of salmon.
I think the feds are now shooting them. They used to trap and release them but the same animal would show up again a few weeks later.
@ AJSmit:
So what?
The word “animal” comes from the Latin “anima” referring to a non-christian idea of a “life force” that makes them able to move. Maybe all christians should stop using the word “animal”, and just refer to every living thing a either a “creature” or a “critter”?
Or maybe we can all just just keep using the words in it’s contemporary meaning and not obsess of minor details in etymology.
I think we are seeing creo envy. Scientists make new discoveries routinely while their 2 pages of bronze age mythology hasn’t changed a bit since the bronze age. And will never change.
While they are living on a flat earth, watching the sun orbiting it, and waiting for the apocalypse to kill everyone “soon”, we are lofting huge telescopes into earth orbit (carefully avoiding that sun orbiting the earth, of course) to find new planets around other stars and watch gamma ray sources and the Big Bang.
Others are finding predicted transitional fossils in exotic locations and figuring out what caused the mass extinctions. Or making it possible to live long, healthy lives. Science is limitless and 2 pages of bronze age mythology are 2 pages of bronze age mythology.
almost always indicates some fluff-brain’s about to spout off some clever little line they picked up from the bigger kids at Bible study.
If this were a game of volleyball, poor AJ’s nose would’ve been broken by the spike Zetetic nailed him with before he could even get off the ground.
Now that was fucking amusing, wouldn’t you say, AJ?
@raven
Well put.
It’s a belief system that just can’t adapt to it’s environment aka “reality”. It dying all over the word and deep down inside they know it, even if they can’t admit it.
Instead they’re just fighting a delaying action now, with word games and lies. They’ll make an occasional push forward, but any region that falls for their lies only ends up as a laughingstock and cripples it’s own chance at progressing. Just like the flat Earth believers at the end of the 1800’s. Religious beliefs that at least try to make some acceptance of reality seem to be far more successful in the long run.
I wouldn’t be surprised that if in a century or two, there are a few creos still around, limited to a handful of crank websites (or whatever the equivalent will be at such a time) that people ignore unless they bring it up as a joke.
Stupid typos! Should try doing fewer things at once… oh well.
@Brownian
Thanks! :)
Let’s note that “atom” means “unsplittable”, therefore nuclear physics is all wrong…
(this thread is going to the most interesting places)
Regarding “transitional species”:
The idea of a species is an arbitrary human construct (it seems real because the pace of evolution is slow compared to a human life time — or even many generations.) Living things are all on a continuum of change; there is no clear demarcation when one day it’s one species and the next another.
Speciation occurs (in my understanding) when two interbreeding populations are separated (no DNA mixing) for whatever reason (geography is popular) and then evolve in different directions (of course – there’s no teleological side to EBNS and exact symmetry doesn’t exist in the real world.) When and if they (members of the two poulations) meet up again, they don’t recognize eachother as potential mates and don’t interbreed. Further divergent evolution occurs. Pretty soon, they look very different indeed.
From what I understand of recent genetic work on the genus Canis, shows that they can all interbreed. They don’t for, for lack of a better word, cultural reasons: they don’t see eachother as mates. (I also think there’s a tenuous balance even amongst interbreeding populations. One minute that creature is competing with me for my dinner and the next I need to make babies with it. Hmmm, not so different from my home life …) If we dug up a fossilized Chihuahua and a fossilized great Dane, would we classify them as the same species? I doubt it very much.
The rate of change is not dictated by EBNS. Even “unchanged” species (crocs, coelecanth, sharks, horseshoe “crabs”, etc.) are changing. EBNS keeps their phenotype more or less in one spot. This is a kind of evolution too and shows EBNS clearly: Their DNA changes but EBNS keeps them in the same spot — because it works, which is the only thing EBNS “cares” about. (Creationists use phenotype stasis as an argument against EBNS. Once again demonstrating their ignorance.)
Seems to me that the pressure to remain the same is greater than the pressure to change (selection pressure) most of the time. Hence “punctuated equilibrium.” The expected result predicted by EBNS is: Mostly not much change unless there’s strong pressure, and then rapid change. Earth’s system tends toward stability (which is a lucky thing for our species.)
Oops, I did use the word “creature,” and I need to stop. A bit of consciouness raising. Animal is the correct word. How about “critter?” Or maybe automobile DNA.
Zetetic @125:
Oh, there are plenty of those still around …
There were some questions early on in this thread as to the paleogeographic position of the Canadian Arctic ~23Ma. The general view is that arctic geography in the Early Miocene wasn’t that much different than it is today.
See:
http://www.scotese.com/0202d.htm
Basically, by about 15Ma, the world fairly similar to the way it looks now:
http://www.scotese.com/miocene.htm
There was also a question of how these reconstructions are made. I could go into that, but I really don’t think you’d find it that interesting.
I was looking at some photos of plesiosaur fossil skeletons (amazingly complete ones.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plesiosaur_cast_arp.jpg
One thing that struck me was how they had fore and aft “pelvises.” The connection between spine and flippers was very similar fore and aft. Seems to me they must have branched off the other reptiles waaaaaaayyyy back.
(Maybe I just need to brush up on my reptilian anatomy …)
To: Wayne Robinson (explanation)
Baikal seal (nerpa, Pusa sibirica) of course did not evolve convergently, it is true seal, member of the same clade, as all other seals around the world ;-) Thus that four-legged creature sheds no light on the origins of Baikal seal, but to the origins of seals in general. Baikal seal is a member of genus Pusa, close relative of e.g. ringed seal (Pusa hispida) of the Arctic. There are much more members of that genus, living in freshwater lakes (Ladoga lake of Russia – Pusa hispida ladogensis, Saimaa lake of Finland – Pusa hispida saimensis) or closed saltwater basin, separated from the world ocean (Caspian Sea – Pusa caspica). Surely, they evolved quite recently, during Pleistocene – it is still a mystery, how they get both to Caspian Sea and Baikal Lake, however there is a hypothesis about former water connection between Baikal and Arctic Sea.
JBlilie, perhaps these will help?
http://www.plesiosauria.com/pdf/smith_2003_msc.pdf
http://www.plesiosaur.com/database/pdf/Okeefe_2002%20.pdf
http://www.science.marshall.edu/okeefef/PDFS/OK2001AZF.pdf
I’m reading a book by Wayne Grady called, The Bone Museum
This is an excellent book, everyone go read it. It’s reminiscent of Delta Willis’ The Hominid Gang, but with feathered dinosaurs instead of hominids.
It’s rooted anyway, that’s why it has an outgroup. And zero-length branches result from not including autapomorphies of OTUs in the matrix (plus, they’re exceedingly rare anyway).
Pattern cladism is completely silly. :-)
Really? Your data matrices aren’t that small, are they?
When something lacks autapomorphies (which are deliberately excluded when one makes a data matrix, because they’re parsimony-uninformative), and has the right age, it enters consideration for being an ancestor. But, in the vertebrate fossil record, when something is claimed to lack autapomorphies that usually just means people haven’t looked hard enough. (That’s what it was like for Archaeopteryx. For over 100 years, most people simply assumed it was a direct ancestor of all later birds and therefore automatically interpreted anything Archie had as plesiomorphic. Turns out it has a pretty nice list of autapomorphies.) And when you still can’t find any, that usually means they were in the soft parts and didn’t get preserved…
Yes, cladistics is incapable of identifying ancestors as such. Science as a whole is incapable of identifying ancestors as such, unless you have a lot of information on the quality of the fossil record and use the principle of parsimony.
Nope. The Baikal seal is a completely ordinary modern seal.
Here‘s the latest treatment of that subject.
ROTFLMAO!!!
I know (I linked to a syllabics chart which confirms that), and the speaker flips that around. I just tried again (four times): he does it very clearly, and it doesn’t depend on Mac vs PC or anything else about the sound system on my end. Has vowel metathesis occurred in some dialect of Inuktitut? ~:-| If so, please add that here, where it only mentions that /u/ is replaced by /i/ “in many contexts” in northwestern Greenland (not far away from Devon Island, I suppose).
Come on. That’s just a (weird) feature of English.
The front one is simply the shoulder girdle.
There is no connection between the shoulder girdle and the backbone in plesiosaurs (or just about anywhere else).
The speaker probly also says nucular.
LOL, well, is there a reason he’s not a native speaker?
ARGH! Is there a reason to assume he’s not a native speaker?
(Saying “nookular” is not some kind of global phenomenon. It’s restricted to English.)
Regarding comment #19,
One minor point, otters undulate in the vertical plane in their rapid swimming mode. The giant otter’s tail is correspondingly flattened to a considerable degree. I don’t know how they use their tail when they’re in their slower foot-paddling mode.
JBlilie said…
A fact of which I’m quite well aware. My point is that what was once considered a serious movement trying to undermine science in support religious dogma, has now been reduced to the point of irrelevancy (for the most part). Their greatest public presence today are a few kooks on ignored web sites, or an ignorant TV show co-host. Therefore, at present, the Flat Earthers are no longer a threat to human progress.
Even many YECs laugh at them today, failing to realize that the only thing separating them from the Flat Earthers, is that the F.E.s interpret a few lines of the bible (or Koran) more literally. They use the same “logic”, the same arguments, and the same type of “evidence”. It’s funny how the YECs that laugh at the flat Earthers don’t realize how little difference there is between them.
That F.E.s were pushed to irrelevancy by facts, logic, education, and technological progress, gives me hope that the same will occur to the the YECs. It’s probably just going to take longer due to the emotional issues involved and that evolution has less of a readily apparent (to the lay person) impact on people’s lives. While they will still be there, in the future, desperately clutching on to their self-deluded ignorance in a world that just doesn’t care about their opinion anymore, they won’t be able to cause any further harm at that point.
Hmmm… Upon reflection I think that I left my last post open to some misinterpretation.
I didn’t meant to be seeming to pontificating (joke intended) so much in your direction JBlilie, but I can see that I left it open to be interpreted that way. I was merely meaning to expand upon my own position. My apologies if my last post gave you that impression, it wasn’t my intention.
Just thought I should clear that up before there were any misunderstandings.
Ferd @ 76
Down here in TX it’s the Caucasians we worry about.
They can sneak up on you right quick.
I usually just throw a Lone Star Beercan on the ground, and when they lunge for it, I catch ’em behind the ear with a small calibur.
They’re okay as long as you cook ’em thoroughly, and don’t eat the brain, or you might catch the Spongies.