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EDITORIAL: Evidence Mounts: Fishopod Discovery Bolsters Evolution Theory By Filling Gaps in the Fossil Record

Posted on: Wednesday, 12 April 2006, 15:00 CDT

By The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

Apr. 12--Though towering piles of evidence have been found to bolster the case for evolution, some people persist in pointing to gaps in the fossil record to argue that the process never occurred.

The latest find, a truly monumental one, is a pointed reminder that those gaps continue to fill in, leaving fewer holes within which creationists can take cover.

The fossil of a fish with four legs, called Tiktaalik roseae, was found after five years of digging in Nunavut, the icy, far north Canadian territory. This "fishopod," as the research team calls it, is likely the most important paleontological discovery in nearly 150 years.

The specimen is more complete and better preserved than any of the previously found transition fossils that show how some fish, pressured over generations by their environment, evolved to drag themselves out of the world's oceans hundreds of millions of years ago and live on land.

The Tiktaalik, which lived about 375 million years ago, had typical fins and scales. But it also had a movable neck, and the ends of its fins were structured vaguely like wrists and feet.

Its gills had lost the coverings that modern fish have to fan the water for oxygen, and that could mean that the fishopod could breathe out of the water.

The scientific community thinks the Tiktaalik belongs in the evolution

chapter of biology textbooks right next to the archaeopteryx, the famous transitional fossil, a 150 million-yearold half-reptile, half-bird that was discovered in the 1860s.

Unfortunately, it would be too much to ask that the discovery of Tiktaalik would sway those who refuse to listen.

Archaeopteryx is still labeled a hoax by creationists.

They say that the feather impressions on the bones were carved there in the 19 th century by those who wanted to fool the public, even though modern electron microscopes reveal fossilized bacteria in the grooves that couldn't have been faked.

Creationists have claimed London's Natural History Museum turns away researchers who ask to look at the fossil, though the museum denies that it ever keeps researchers out. Next, creationists claimed that archaeopteryx was totally misclassified as a partial reptile; it's completely a bird, they say, and therefore can't be a transitional form.

They protest too much. And they probably will again.

Survival of a fossil is a geological miracle, requiring an ancient animal's remains to survive millions of years of erosion, sedimentation, plate tectonics and volcanism.

So, naturally, it is unlikely that every stage of every creature's evolution is going to be found.

But that hasn't deterred scientists. They can be counted on to continue filling in those gaps.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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