Missing Evolutionary Link Found?
Google's logo today is just part of a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign unveiling what many scientists are calling the Holy Grail of human evolution; a nearly intact fossil of a 47 million-year-old primate skeleton that appears to represent the missing link between humans and apes. Ida -- officially known as Darwinius masillae -- is the fossil of a small creature, about the size of a cat, that scientists say shows both opposable thumbs and fingernails. The fossil is nearly 20 times older than most fossils that provide evidence for human evolution.
'Ida' was actually found preserved in Germany's Messel Pit back in 1983 by private collectors and measures approximately 3 feet in length. The private collectors who unearthed the fossil apparently didn't realize what they had, resulting in the fossil being sold in two parts and lost to the world for years. Norwegian paleontologist Dr. Jorn Horum of the University of Oslo led the team that has secretly studied the fossil for the past two years and is making sure the world is well aware of his discovery through a new book, documentary and promotional Web site.
"This specimen is like finding the Lost Ark for archeologists," lead scientist Jorn Hurum said during a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History. "It is the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail. This fossil will probably be the one that will be pictured in all textbooks for the next 100 years."
Not all scientists agree that this find is indeed the Holy Grail, however. "I actually don't think it's terribly close to the common ancestral line of monkeys, apes and people,'" said K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as reported in The New York Times. "I would say it's about as far away as you can get from that line and still be a primate."
Rather than a long-ago aunt, "I would say it's more like a third cousin twice removed,'' he said. So it probably resembles ancestral creatures "only in a very peripheral way."
Comments
So according to what I’ve found so far it appears that we evolved from something from the sea into a lemur with opposable digits aka “Ida”, then we evolved into monkeys that don’t have opposable digits then into people with opposable digits and opposable opinions? I’m not arguing for or against evolution or creation, but this seems a little off kilter to me. The fact that Dr. Jorn Horum compared this unveiling to boy band hype isn’t really helping me get all warm and fuzzy over “Ida” either. You know I guess it doesn’t matter since we’re all going to die in 2012.
The only link is Jesus Christ, a.k.a. God, who created everything and is in control of all information–revealed and unrevealed.
Unfortunately, the article that you printed makes the statement that the fossil, “Ida”, “…appears to represent the missing link between humans and apes”. This gives the impression that it is an intermediate stage in an evolutionary line of descent from apes to humans. This isn’t what was presented in the program, “The Link”, on the History Channel last night. Rather, it was claimed that Ida is a fossil ancestor of both apes and humans and therefore is a link between apes and humans, just as our common grandparents are a link between me and my cousins. Ida appears to represent a species that existed after the prosimians (lemurs, tarsiers, etc.) split off and before the split between simians (apes) and Hominids (humans) occurred. Despite what anti-evolutionists say, evolutionists don’t claim that humans descended from apes (not that that would be a bad thing).
I agree Verla. Science is the physical explanation of God’s work
IF we evolved from apes, why are there still APES?????
….I thought the last comment read ‘if we evolved from apes….why are we still apes?….
…good question though - I would have thought?
What do u mean why r there still apes. humans are apes. we r just a diffrent spices of apes that happens to come out on top. as organisims reproduce, offsprings are born with adaptatons according to the life lived by there paretns and grandparents and all the ones before that. eventually an organisim gets so many adaptations the it becomes an entirally new spices thats why there are monkey chips goriilas, etc and humans because before they were humans they had diffrent adaptation the “apes” did not