Yet another holy grail found
Sorry for the cross-post for those of you on the geo-paleo lists...but this is fairly intense.
Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years ago.
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060405.tiktaalik.shtml
There have always been a few really salient cases (e.g. various osteolepiformes) but this one is like a brick on the head.* Now all we need is a case that conclusively demonstrates later dinosaurs had a warm-blooded metabolism, and I will have all the Cool Discoveries of 2006 a kid could ask for.
* The Young Earth freaksalads are going to have to work extra specially hard to dogmatize this one. Who knows, they may fall back on the now-classic "Satan put the fossils there to trick us" debacle. In that case (since the net is apparently down), I fall back on evolution as the singlemost unifying theory in all biology "just because."
Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years ago.
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060405.tiktaalik.shtml
There have always been a few really salient cases (e.g. various osteolepiformes) but this one is like a brick on the head.* Now all we need is a case that conclusively demonstrates later dinosaurs had a warm-blooded metabolism, and I will have all the Cool Discoveries of 2006 a kid could ask for.
* The Young Earth freaksalads are going to have to work extra specially hard to dogmatize this one. Who knows, they may fall back on the now-classic "Satan put the fossils there to trick us" debacle. In that case (since the net is apparently down), I fall back on evolution as the singlemost unifying theory in all biology "just because."