Transterrestrial Musings




Defend Free Speech!


Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay




Site designed by


Powered by
Movable Type 4.0
Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« One Week To Plan | Main | Roomba Hacking »

You Want Transitional Fossils?

Carl Zimmer has the story.

A graduate student at the University of Chicago named Matt Friedman was starting to research his dissertation on the diversity of teleosts. While paging through a book on fish fossils, he noticed a 50-million year old specimen called Amphistium. Like many fish fossils, this one only showed the bones from one side of the animal. It was generally agreed that Amphistium belonged to some ordinary group of teleosts, although biologists argued over which one. But Friedman saw something different. To him it looked like a flounder.

[Via LGF]

 
 

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: You Want Transitional Fossils?.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.transterrestrial.com/admin/mt-tb.cgi/9889

2 Comments

ken anthony wrote:

Seems a bit fishy to me.

50 million is 1/90th the earths life. It must have been a fluke! Which should be my sole answer except I like to flounder.

The observations are good basic science, but conclusions are another thing. We don't need to go back 50 million years to see animals with shared traits.

The real question is, if you filet them, would they still be good eat'n?

Definitely a weird fish.

Jeff Mauldin wrote:

Ken: are you fin-ished yet?

Leave a comment

Note: The comment system is functional, but timing out when returning a response page. If you have submitted a comment, DON'T RESUBMIT IT IF/WHEN IT HANGS UP AND GIVES YOU A "500" PAGE. Simply click your browser "Back" button to the post page, and then refresh to see your comment.
 

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on July 13, 2008 12:59 PM.

One Week To Plan was the previous entry in this blog.

Roomba Hacking is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Powered by Movable Type 4.1