Fossil helps document shift from sea to land
By Sid Perkins
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/33623/title/Fossil_helps_document_shift_from_sea_to_land

New fossils of an ancient, four-limbed creature help fill in the blanks of the evolutionary transition between fish and the first land-adapted vertebrates.

Fossils of creatures that span the water-to-land transition of vertebrates are few and far between. One of those pioneers, Ventastega curonica, was first described in 1994 but previously has been known only from fragmentary remains unearthed from 365-million-year-old rocks at a site in western Latvia. Fossils found at the site during subsequent excavations now allow scientists to more fully reconstruct the creature, says Per Ahlberg, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

The new remains — including most of the creature’s skull, the braincase, half of the bones in its forelimb and a quarter of its pelvic girdle — suggest that Ventastega was an evolutionary intermediate between Tiktaalik, a four-limbed fish that lived about 382 million years ago (SN: 6/17/06, p. 379), and subsequent tetrapods such as Acanthostega, which were capable of walking on land.

The size and proportions of the new fossils hint that Ventastega probably measured between 1 and 1.3 meters in length. Most features of the creature’s skull match those of Tiktaalik, which lived millions of years earlier, but the overall shape of the skull and braincase “is characteristically ‘early tetrapod,’” Ahlberg says. Likewise, the creature’s lower jawbone was shaped like that of early tetrapods but was adorned with fangs like those found in its fishy predecessors, he notes. “Ventastega was a mosaic of features.”

Ventastega lived approximately during the same era as Acanthostega, but its features were more primitive, a sign that Ventastega may have been an evolutionary holdover, Ahlberg says. Nevertheless, the size and shape of Ventastega’s limb bones, particularly those of its forelimbs, suggest that the creature’s limbs ended in digits, not fins.

The fossil record suggests that the evolutionary transition between fish and early tetrapods was smooth. Over millions of years, these creatures’ eyes grew larger and their snouts became broader while the overall size of the skull decreased somewhat, Ahlberg and his colleagues report in the June 26 Nature.

The new fossils of Ventastega “are great,” says Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. Although the newly described remains include just a few bones, “they’re very informative,” he adds. The earliest tetrapods probably evolved between 5 million and 7 million years before Tiktaalik, he notes, and the new fossils will help researchers predict what those creatures would have looked like.

As pastor of the Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida, Baldwin once served in the 1980s as Florida chairman of the Moral Majority founded by the late Jerry Falwell. Before Falwell passed away in 2007, Baldwin distanced himself from his former mentor because of Falwell’s continuing support for President George W. Bush and other GOP headliners who had “strayed from positions vitally important to conservatives.” In the widely read Internet news column he has authored for many years, Baldwin endorsed the 2008 candidacy of Texas Congressman Ron Paul for the Republican nomination, and he specifically spoke out against the candidacies of Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain. A consistent critic of the current occupant of the White House, Baldwin has regularly chided fellow Christian Right pastors and their flocks for “blind support for President Bush in particular and the Republican Party in general.” He has faulted them for refusing to “honestly face the real danger confronting these United States,” the loss of sovereignty.

Say what you want – he’s still going to win. He will be the POTUS, that’s a fact. Bottomline – he is the Republican candidate, I am a Republican and I will support my Party and our candidate.
I’d really be surprised if he won. his base is not motivated, and the democrats are. I’m a conservative, not a republican, and they are no longer conservative, and I won’t vote for dem-lite. and the first thing he’ll do is push for amnesty…

right4life on June 20, 2008 at 8:39 AM

There’s always The Constitution Party.

right4life on June 20, 2008 at 8:39 AM

There’s always The Constitution Party.

davidk…peace.

RushBaby on June 19, 2008 at 11:23 PM

Heh? Thought the auditorium was empty. :^]

video is part of a series that discusses Intelligent Design … please view it and decide if it is OK for your children to watch!…

Further elaboration of the laboratory evidence for evolution:

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php

In all the models studied, the moon could not sustain an ocean for more than around 30 million years.
….
Plumes of water vapor were detected erupting out of the surface, and infrared measurements showed 5.8 gigawatts of heat emanating from several narrow ridges called “tiger stripes.”

“It’s a no-brainer that tidal heating is happening on Enceladus,” said William McKinnon of Washington University in Saint Louis. “I can conceive of no other explanation for the south polar thermal anomaly.”

link

but just like any inconvenient fact in evolution, I’m sure they’ll come up with some ‘just-so’ story to maintain the billions of years needed for hairygod darwin and his evolutionary fable to work in..

Say what you want – he’s still going to win. He will be the POTUS, that’s a fact. Bottomline – he is the Republican candidate, I am a Republican and I will support my Party and our candidate.

I’d really be surprised if he won. his base is not motivated, and the democrats are. I’m a conservative, not a republican, and they are no longer conservative, and I won’t vote for dem-lite. and the first thing he’ll do is push for amnesty…

But that’s why John McCain is our perfect nominee, he isn’t all wingnutted out with the relgious craziness, he understands that this country was settled by the faithful, not the nutjobs who clock you over the head with the cross daily.
uh yeah all you ‘real’ ‘conservatives’ voting for the backstabbing captain queeg.

uh yeah glad he’s your nominee…hope theres lots of you ‘conservatives’ to vote for him….cause I sure won’t….and no real conservative would.

right4life on June 19, 2008 at 9:10 PM

Say what you want – he’s still going to win. He will be the POTUS, that’s a fact. Bottomline – he is the Republican candidate, I am a Republican and I will support my Party and our candidate.

[I]t seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the charateristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.

Anthony Flew

Q. What are some of the larger questions which are still unanswered by evolutionary theory.

A. The origen of life. There is no consensus ar all here–lots of theories, little science. That’s one of the reasons we didn’t cover it in the series. The evidence wasn’t very clear.

Richard Hutton Producer of the PBS series “Evolution”

Evolution is so clearly a fact that you need to be committed to something like a belief in the supernatural if you are at all indisagreement with evolution. It is a fact and we don’t need to prove it anymore.

Ernst Mayr

It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts I do understand.

Mark Twain

The notion that monotheism evolved from polytheism was discarded decades ago. Catch up, dude.

Evolution is a load of cwap.

An increasing number of scientists, most particularly a growing number of evolutionists, … argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory is no genuine scietific theory at all … . Many of the critics have the highest intellectual credentials.

Micheal Ruse

It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not go there.

Richard Dawkins

A partial list of people who belive in creation:

Agassiz
Boyle
Brewster
Dalton
davidk
Faraday
Galileo
Herschel
Kelvin
Kepler
Linnaeus
Maunder
Maxwell
Mendel
Newton
Pascal
Pasteur
Ramsay
Ray
Steno
Woodward

only one of which is insane.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own two eyes.

Groucho Marx

We are intelligent beings, and intelligent beings could not have been formed by a blind, brute insensible thing.

Voltaire

But that’s why John McCain is our perfect nominee, he isn’t all wingnutted out with the relgious craziness, he understands that this country was settled by the faithful, not the nutjobs who clock you over the head with the cross daily.

uh yeah all you ‘real’ ‘conservatives’ voting for the backstabbing captain queeg.

uh yeah glad he’s your nominee…hope theres lots of you ‘conservatives’ to vote for him….cause I sure won’t….and no real conservative would.

AprilOrit on June 19, 2008 at 6:47 PM
Ditto and if you don’t agree with them then you are not “a real conservative”. Those who know don’t speak and those who speak don’t know.

ronsfi on June 19, 2008 at 7:00 PM

But that’s why John McCain is our perfect nominee, he isn’t all wingnutted out with the relgious craziness, he understands that this country was settled by the faithful, not the nutjobs who clock you over the head with the cross daily.

Dick Morris is right about this, we are lucky John McCain is our nominee.