Dinos and Men (How do we assess the claims of sources?)

Arrrgh, you're right. I mis-spoke. I should have said "llamas didn't exist 35 mya", rather than Camelidae. The split between suborder Tylopoda and the rest of the Artiodactyls occurred around 35 mya. The first known llama-like critter, Hemiauchenia, doesn't appear in N. America until around 3 mya, and the first true llama appears in S. America around 2 mya. Poebrotherium is a very basal camelid that shows up around the Eocene-Oligocene boundary in N. America. Of course, the first "true camel" (Procamelus) doesn't show up until the Late Miocene, so there. Right, artiodactyls are derived from condylarths which had five toes like everything else. However, all the Tylopoda are even toed, which means that a five-toed-llama would be unusual to say the least.

Interestingly, AIG thinks it's a pterosaur. Can't be easy to identify it unambiguously! From http://groups-beta.google.com/...rigins/msg/344ab897e705c7cd:

quote:

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> >Regarding the Archaeopteryx claim, at the end of
> >http://www.ucgrsa.org/creation/geology.htm a reference is made to an
> >article in Science Digest, Nov. 1968. I have access to this, and can
> >look it up later this week.
>
> That would be great. TIA.

​

Huse's source is "The Creation-Evolution Controversy" by R. L. Wysong,
who in turn refers to the aforementioned Science Digest article.

​

The article is on the inside of the front cover, with the photograph on
the upper half and the text below it. An "archaeologist-journalist"
named Jose Diaz-Bolio makes the claim that the sculpture is "a realistic
representation of an animal that lived during the period of the ancient
Mayans--1,000 to 5,000 years ago".

​

It's uncertain whether Diaz-Bolio claimed the sculpture resembled
Archaeopteryx, but what follows is the relevant passage:

​

If indeed such serpent-birds _were_ contemporary with the ancient
Mayan culture, the relief sculpture represents a startling
evolutionary oddity. Animals with such characteristics are believed
to have disappeared 130 million years ago. The archaeornis and the
archaeopteryx, to which the sculpture bears a vague resemblance,
were flying reptiles that became extinct during the Mesozoic age of
dinosaurs.

​

But unfortunately the bird, though stylized, looks far more like a
living bird than it does Archaeopteryx. It's depicted from the side in a
cramped pose, and seems to be part of a larger sculpture, as if its
purpose was to fill the area it's in, rather than to be an accurate
depiction. The neck is extremely long, and positioned as if its owner
were trying to imitate an 's' rotated 90 degrees clockwise, and if
straightened out it would be half again as long as the body and tail
together. The tail itself looks like a living bird's tail, and not the
reptilian archetype possessed by Archaeopteryx. The legs are long, and
it seems to be resting on its ankles with the feet splayed out below the
neck. It has a long and obvious bill, something also lacked by
Archaeopteryx, and its nostrils are below and immediately in front of
its eyes, also unlike Archaeopteryx. There are no teeth or wing claws to
be seen. The sculpture is nothing more than a Mayan interpretation of a
heron.

​

Interestingly, Answers in Genesis seems to think the creature depicted
resembles a pterosaur. See
Thunderbirds | Answers in Genesis just
after the heading "Mexico and South America".

​

And on another interesting note, on the same page this topic is
mentioned in "The Creation-Evolution Controversy", the five-toed llama
is brought up as well, and references are given:

​

E. Colbert: Evolution of the Vertebrates (N.Y.: Wiley, 1955), p.386; P.
Honore: In Quest of the White God (N.Y.: Putnam, 1964), pp. 164,165.

​

I have access to both of these.

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More to come ...

Thanks for showing me what I had wanted to be a professional of.I do not think thatis a

either, and
looks ODDLY enough to me gestaltwise to reptiles that are between turtles and snakes to support the same.
A baby PTerosaur I saw in the Clemson Museum looked more like this last than the first above and seemed more like a water creature to me. Could they have developed from water swiming babies to flying adults?
The stone pic HOWEVER looks awfully familiar, not something I would expect. So authenticity is still and issue for me.
I learned very quickly as a teenager to see herps NOT like they were displayed as but in actual photographs. Jurassic Park etc, I can hardly watch with out upchucking.
I dont have a clear enough sense of these forms to really say but I wonder whether what are wings might not be bone also?

If your correspondant has access to both the Colbert and Honore references, I'd be very interested in reading the full context. Although both references are fairly old, I'm curious as to what they based their contentions on.

Me, too. We'll see what transpires.

At Extinct Llamas and Elephants - Village Pets there's a drawing of some pottery with a picure of a llama that might possibly have five toes, with the caption "Five-toed llamas millions of years out of place". In Re: Llamas and toes Emmanuelle Foster writes:

quote:

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I tried to investigate this claim a few years ago and I contacted Erich to know where he found the pottery or picture of the pottery. He
replied that the drawing was not an actual rendition of anything he
has seen, but an attempt by his daughter to illustrate the claim.
As for the reference to Colbert and Honore....Colbert gives the framework, only Honore talks about 5 toe llamas

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{ellipsis in original - JonF}I'm almost speechless. Could the supposed pottery evidence really be nothing more than a drawing by a no-doubt charming young lady who's never seen anything relevant? I might try to confirm Emmanuelle's report.In Re: Llamas and toes "Augray" writes:

quote:

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Colbert makes no mention of them, but Honor states that the archaeologist Julio Csar Tello found skeletons of five-toed llamas around 1920. Unfortunately, any English publications by Tello that I've requested from storage at the University of Toronto are missing. The quest continues...

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{ellipsis in original - JonF}Hopefully more to come ...

Thanks Jon. Looks like we were on the right track. T'aint no such critter.

of course the ica stone pics look familiar. we've all seen such pictures of dinosaurs, in old magazines and coloring books and such.but the one you posted is OBVIOUSLY a forgery. how do i know?
1. it mixes time periods (triceratops = late cretaceous, stego/sauropods = jurassic)
2. bipedal dinosaurs did not (and COULD NOT) stand upright like that.however, i've seen dozens of books from years gone by with such depictions. it's quite obvious then that artist used one such book/magazine/whatever as a source, and not actual experience with the real animals.look at the cave painting at lascaeux. the animals may be stylized but it's pretty easy to tell (from both and archaeological and artist persepective) that the artists had experience with the animals and observed their actual biological forms.now look at the ica stones in comparison. heck, even jurassic park seems better. they look almost identical the blanket i slept under as a child, with big cartoon primary colored dinosaurs on it.

The idea is that dinosaurs survived into modern times. This makes Jurasic and Cretaceous forms become contemporaneous.

Copying with improvements, humm.Maybe you have just explained how we got the Bible.

*sigh*yes, ned, but. but. oh nevermind.

Yes I somewhat entered this line of posting somewhat tongue in cheek. But I was impressed by the range of forms in the figurines. If man lived when the giant tail was all man inuited from the cold bloods we can not use our advanced emotive capability on looking at fur etc to bias the shapes our eyes might suggest to reason at. So I will indeed agree that even the forms of figurines are more likely fradulent if you can think in the same provision that the following looks just as specious does it?This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 02-27-2005 13:03 AM

looks like the work of madness to me.

OK but I will still continue to argue that Provine is an APOLOGIST for Sheppard.SheppardNatural Selection and Heredity 1958p 113

quote:

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"Originally, although agreeing that selection could be an improtant factor in evolution, he seemed to believe that genetic drift was almost essential for prolonged evolutionary changes to occur in a species, and that many of the characters which distinguished them are evolved as the result of genetic drift and are neutral or even deleterious with respect to their effect on the survival of the individual. This view is clearly too extreme, and he has consideratble modifed it in recent years. When Wright first put forward his hypothesis, others, notably Fisher, maintained that genetic drift was of little or no consequence in evolution.
Population studies
The dispute arose as the result of these opposed views on drift stimulated many workers to investigate the matter in wild populations. It is only by work in the field that one can get ther required information.

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And looking at the forms of the figurines even though made by an artists' imagination rather than direct perspective on nature was not as erroneous as Provine's reflection on the LACK OF USE of the Wright/Fisher tension which he SUBSEQUENTLY used to argue against the position of Johnson where the carrier of the characters if broad enough needs USE, the difference; not further historicize the biology, between molecular changes and speciation differences, as Gould went (out) with it.Provine Chapter headings
Early Life and Eduation
Castle East and Harvard
Harvard
USDA and Washington
Path COefficients and Animal Breeding
Chicago and Physiological Genetics
Adaptation and Evolution
Wright/Fisher and evo in nature
Shifting Balance
Wright/Dobshansky and GENETICS in Natural Pops
Genetics of natural pop series
1940-1955
WisconSIN.
by Univ of Chicago PressWhat we have in this post is qualitative description ->qualitative statement not Provine's 'turning a consequence' he attempts to maintain neutrally. He failed that as well as me. If he really thought he could go from history to present biology biology would have been better served if he tried to rework Sheppard's "carrier" in modern information technology rather than NOT DO THIS and go after Johnson instead with a faulty use of Kant's terriTORY after allowing me to be both a carrier in the flesh( attempting to carry ON a tradition Wright and I might have gotten pedegogically from Zeleny) and flunking me so to say.Some day I'll try to dig up the actual fossils that the figurines reminded me of so you can see what shape I actually was thinking of. Why do you think that Provine said that Johnson unlike Darwin would not be in the BOTTOM of the class at Harvard? If he remeberrred I was not graduated, that would be better, but it would be worse in his own bare language. He just wanted a justification for not going to Church on Sunday. So he got rid of dealing with "Mathematical speculations" of Sheppard(same page op cit) by trying to do science USING Mayr's insular comments on bean bags AND accosting Wright on the telephone with modern nonlinear/nonequilibrium thought that Wright never thought much of. And somehow the Cornell faculty accepted that this was biology rather than revisionist history, all at the same time that there are still some people hired by my Grandfather at SUNY Fredonia.My grandfather is well remembered in town as well as at school and he WAS part of the science that Sheppard used to argue against Wright on. There was too much preference for proper English rather than simple differences of anatomy and physiology. Whether the difference of Mayr's form of isolation and my congruence class of figures must be visually the same as in this thread is doubtful. I agree with you on that. Provine wrote that this tension had no effect in biology but in effect since he was the "expert" on it, he has prevented even the tracing back, of this intension (of mine) and probably others.The opposed views of creation and evolution are broad enough that it is maddening to see how narrow was the extreme proper characters subject the trait to. Current molecular work is proving that this information can come out of the lab as well as the field. That I do prefer it fielded is why I had an open mind on seeing something in the link that looked like it broadend the external exploration rather than internal hermenutic but that is my how I like to be classified subjectively only.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 02-27-2005 12:56 AM