Land Mammal to Whale transition: fossils Part II

yes, and the piltdown man was originally considered a legitimate missing link.basilosaurus was named by dr. richard harland in 1843. he was working from bones collected by someone else, and from an incomplete skeleton. paleontology was something of a fledgeling science then, and not everybody got everything right the first time. basically, they thought the top one kind of looked like the bottom one. and it kind of does. however, a skilled eye will immediately pick out that the top one as mammalian ribs and spines, and the bottom has reptilian. there are lots of various differences.sir richard owen, working from a nearly complete skeleton some years later identified that this was not a reptile, but a mammal, and a relative of whales. this is not under discussion, and the assignments of major defining characteristics are not arbitrary. it is most certainly not a reptile, and is most certainly a mammal.paleontologists today know what they're doing. it is a science, not a bunch of people sitting around in a room making stuff up.edit. suppose you didn't know who your father was. so you decide you're gonna make all of the guys you happen to know, at work, in social situations, etc, take a paternity test.one turns out to be your uncle. can you reasonably figure out who your father was? your uncle doesn't have kids, and has never had kids, so one of them can't be you.that's sort of what this is. it's a modern whale's great long lost uncle. it and modern whales share a common ancestor. it's closer to that ancestor than modern whales. it's an indications what the transition was, even if it itself was evolutionary dead-end or never gave rise to modern whales.there is so much change and so much SUBTLE change that finding a direct evolutionary pathway with every step (ie: every generation) is just statistically unreasonable. it's a tree-structure, something like a family tree. try tracing yours back a few thousand years, let alone several million. try it with about 90% of the data missing. you might find your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother 's third cousin twice removed. but you're not to likely to find a straight line between you and your earliest ancestorThis message has been edited by arachnophilia, 08-12-2005 02:30 AMThis message has been edited by Admin, 08-12-2005 07:13 AM

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responding to a very old post, because i was reading through the thread and i'm on a paleontology kick tonight. we do!...sort of. we find forms that are not exactly identical but very close. there is obviously a passage of time between modern and ancient, and evolution does indeed occur even in relatively stagnant niches. i could find pictures for this, of course, and make it all nice and obvious. but ferns go back several hundred million years. white sharks go back to the cretacious at least. dragonflies and crocodiles go back at least as early, and let's not forget the coelacanth.these are all modern species with very analogous species "mixed in" with all those ancient species. but like i said, slight changes. our current varieties seem to be a fair bit smaller, but are exactly alike in almost every other way. for instance, carcharodon carcharias is nearly identical in every feature we've found of c. megaladon, except megaladon is nearly twice the size. bad example, really, because all we have of meg are teeth and some poorly preserved vertebrae. but the same case is very evident with crocodiles and dragonflies, since they have a lot more hard parts.more importantly, this is not inconsistent with the ToE. species who fit their niche well would be expected to stay about the same if the niche stayed about the same. if they are an optimum fit, very little mutation would result in a change that is more successful. size probably is dependent on environment changes (availablility and size of prey, etc).This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 08-12-2005 02:13 AM

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i'm a technicality whore.now, it'd be entirely different to find a modern human artifact in the pre-cambrian. i think that was sort of what your were getting at.

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no. like i said, there are changes and differences, and they are different species. just very closely related. no, not exactly. just that things that are more or less modern go back a long way, and that we do find some animals that we have around now mixed in with rock millions of years old. not every animal in the fossil record is extinct.

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no, i suspect not. evenm in the case of "living fossils" there is bound to be some genetic drift (at the very least). i would be amazed to find modern species dating back more thant a few million years.

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yeah, ok, guess i'm wrong on that one.my point was that saying the fossil record is totally devoid of anything that looks modern is also wrong.

no, i don't think that would be reasonable. if only because there was never a human industry in basilosaurus blubber and bones.

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ok, fair enough.