Afarensis: Cetartiodactyla Fossil: A Pretty Picture for the Numbskulls at UD

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Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called Transitions:The Evolution of Life His previous blog can be found here.
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Cetartiodactyla Fossil: A Pretty Picture for the Numbskulls at UD

Category: Creationism • Insanity • Intelligent Design
Posted on: December 31, 2006 12:27 PM, by afarensis, FCD

Davescot has a post up claiming that Zimmer "hears the sounds of taxonomy exploding". This claim is based on Davescot's faulty understanding of Zimmer's article in PLOS Computational Biology. I'll leave Zimmer to address this claim, since he is an articulate and eloquent writer, fully capable of shredding Davescot's bogus claims. I would like to address one of the comments left at UD.

In commenting on the cetacean aspect of Zimmer's article, one person says:

Do you have any actual pictures of the ancestoral fossil record or a link that we may see and judge for ourselves instead of stressing it as an unchallenged fact?

I assume what the commenter really meant was do you have a picture of the fossil that links cetaceans to artiodactyls? Given the general misunderstandings of evolution displayed by the folks at UD it's hard to tell though. Since denizens of UD aren't known for their ability to track down scientific info, here is a picture of the fossil in question:

I'll leave it to the folks at UD to identify the bone and the morphology that links this cetacean fossils to artiodactyls...

In the meantime, I'll be puzzling over Joseph's claim that there should be 50,000+ transitional fossils in the whale lineage ...

Added Later: After spending some time ransacking my archives I am surprised to discover that I have never written about the Cetartiodactyla - other than a brief mention of reading one of the papers on the subject. It's actually a fascinating story, so I may do something on it soon.