Why are there fossils of big dinosaurs but no fossils of in-betweenies?

[plowter]

Why are there fossils of big dinosaurs, like tyrannosaurus rex,
but no fossils of the smaller dinosaurs that evolved into the big fellas - tyrannosaurus regulus?

[Clanad]

Seems to me that at the very least my quotes have come from selected sources that are identified and, in context, can be examined by both sides, no? Whereas your extensive quote had no source attribution and seemed to imply you had full understanding of the information.

Regardless, you've been provided source attribution for my quotes that enables a discussion of the interpretation... something that was impossible with yours...

At the very least, Mr./Ms Plowter may have some insight into the difficulites in reaching any agreement on evolutionary processes... By the way, just what is your explanation of species, since I have a lengthy, growing list of differing explanations or intrepretations, yours would be a worthwhile additon...

[Clanad]

FAO plowter: You are owed an apology for the hijack of your reasonable question thread... please accept mine.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Eh? What extensive quote are you referring to?

There was one sentence, which you'd already noted, and a couple of quotes from the articles you'd misquoted and clearly identified by me as such. Everything else was written by me.

Re your attempt to try and change the subject, I'll do a deal with you; you tell me what your definition of "kind" is, and I'll give you "species". Start a new thread.

Plowter, I also apologise for Clanad's intellectual dishonesty.

[Romaz]

Clanad and WaldoMcFloog - Why don't you take your little spat elsewhere and stop hijacking Plowter's question?

[naomi24]

Romaz, with your record in the past eight years of 87 answers and 1 question to the Ed with a suggestion on how to improve the site, I hardly think you're qualified to tell regular and knowledgeable posters who have something intelligent to offer where and what to post. I find their discussion interesting and relevant to the question – as I'm sure do others - and I don’t see plowter complaining.

[wildwood]

^^Indeed Naomi. It is fun to watch two great minds 'at it' and learn more than you'd get out of a text book.

[plowter]

Gosh, thought there'd be a simple answer to this question. Let's try a different version.

Did the diplodocus evolve an enormous body wih a normal neck and tail and THEN evolve a very long neck and tail. Or were there small versions of sauropods - the tiddly-docus - with long neck and tail that got bigger and bigger in proportion?

[WaldoMcFroog]

The answer is yes, they were preceded by the infraorder prosauropods which includes the 'Mouse Lizard' Mussaurus, which was only about 10 feet long.

Here's an overview: http://dinosaurs.abou...rs/a/prosauropods.htm

[Clanad]

But... but... (at the risk of being called dishonest) that's definitevly not what the article states... in fact it states pretty much the opposite here:

"You might assume from their name that prosauropods eventually evolved into sauropods; this was once thought to be the case, but paleontologists now believe that most prosauropods were actually second cousins, once removed, of the sauropods (not a technical description, but you get the idea!) Rather, it appears that prosauropods evolved in parallel with the true ancestors of sauropods, which have yet to be definitively identified (though there are a number of likely candidates)."

Or... perhaps I'm reading a different quoted article or, alternately, I'm confused again... I'm sure you'll be able to help me out here...

[humbersloop]

sorry op,

clannad, you're american, nip over here for a sec would you

http://www.theanswerb.../Question1179840.html

[WaldoMcFroog]

One to you, Clanad - treasure it.

Actually, it *is* news to me that they're not considered direct ancestors. I was under the impression they were.

I googled for an article after I'd written my response and picked something that looked like it might be a decent overview, but hadn't read it in depth.

Reading up now, it seems the issue with prosauropods is to do with a toe that the pros have in a reduced form (extrapolated from *their* ancestors) that is full in the sauropods. The argument is that it's unlikely that this would evolve to full size once more, although there is quite considerable debate about this and such reversals *are* documented in examples such as segnosaurs.

A quick bit of Googling did turn up this claimed direct ancestor thought: http://www.3news.co.n...D/183705/Default.aspx or http://news.discovery...nosaurs-skeleton.html

Were you going to clarify what my 'extensive quote' was supposed to be, by the way, or are we glossing over that?

[jomifl]

Plowter, there may not be any intermediate giraffes around today but there are other species with very long necks that live in Africa, such as the gerenuk..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerenuk

[Clanad]

Maybe “extensive” was to all encompassing of an adjective to be used… however “Clanad also likes to pretend that the tree of life is only on fossil evidence. It isn't, as well he knows, but has repeatedly ignored when posting on here. Phylogenetic trees constructed using anatomical homology, DNA homology, pseudogenes, endogenous retroviral insertions, and many other methods *all* converge on a similar looking tree. “ is extensive considering the many multisyllabic words (to which I’m not opposed) utilized when no evidence is given that the preparer of the tome has any understanding of their meaning.
It’s worthy of note that our friends at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tr
ee)
emphasize this: “Skepticism might be applied when extinct species are included in trees that are wholly or partly based on DNA sequence data, due to the fact that little useful "ancient DNA" is preserved for longer than 100,000 years, and except in the most unusual circumstances no DNA sequences long enough for use in phylogenetic analyses have yet been recovered from material over 1 million years old.”
That example, plus your failure to even review a link you included as supposedly supporting your position leads me to ask, (at least, semi-seriously) “are you well?” These lapses are not quite in the order of what I would usually expect from the Lord Mayor of Wally World…

Look, I enjoy the sparring as much as I suspect that you do. But I have one simple question:
If evolution is the one and only answer for diversity in today’s world… “Why haven’t new animalbody plans continued to crawl out of the evolutionary cauldron during the past hundreds of millions of years?”
“According to evolution theory, enormous and radical evolutionary changes have taken place in this time, and evolution has not ceased today. So why no new ‘body plans’ (Grundbäuplane) since the time they all allegedly evolved in the Cambrian?
The author of the article in question, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York, describes the experimental development in aquatic worms of resistance to the toxic metal cadmium in only three generations (see sidebar). He says that he finds this ‘capacity for rapid evolutionary change in the face of a novel environmental challenge’ to be ‘startling’. If evolution is this fast, he wonders, why is it, as evolutionary biologists are still trying to determine, that no new body plans have appeared during the past half a billion years?” (Source: J. Levinton, ‘The Big Bang of Animal Evolution’, Scientific American, November 1992, pp.52–59).
Your take on this is sincerely solicited and could add insight to Plowter’s original question.
I suspect that you might be a rather interesting individual with which to have a meaningful discussion if only you didn’t subscribe to the Richard Dawkins school of slash, burn and pillage temper tantrum mode of idea exchange…

[WaldoMcFroog]

So, by 'extensive' you actually meant one sentence, the source of which you already knew and I'd acknowledged? A sentence, I would point out, which is a simple statement that one could find in any one of a thousand places rather than a whole sentence of bogus argument, misquotes and misinterpretation such as you regularly post in your gish gallops (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop).

Your quote from Wikipedia does nothing to change the fact that phylogenic tress are not based exclusively on fossils, which was the point you were attempting to make and which I refuted. Nor are they based exclusively on DNA, as previously stated.

The failure to review the link was certainly unfortunate on my part (although subsequent reading did indicate that there is a debate about whether or not prosauropods were the ancestors plus we still have the link to the stories about the proposed direct ancestor, which answers plowter's point), but hardly symptomatic of illness. If we are to explore such a strange suggestion, what malady would you suggest accounts for your persistent inability to check your C&P creationist quotes in their original context? I note that the one about body plans is yet another C&P. Unless, of course, you are the original author of the article from which it's taken, Carl Wieland, in which case my commiserations.

Yet again, you cannot be bothered to find the source material and read it: http://www.scribd.com...ution-SciAm-1992-11-8
Again, someone else is expected to use Google for you and and point out that in context it doesn't say what creationists think it does and provides several answers to the question you think so &^%$ing devastating and conclusive.

Don't you get tired of being humiliated like this?

Or do you just tick it off your and say, "Oh well, best try cutting and pasting the next one. That's bound to work! Praise Jesus for making me so dishonest!"

You wonder why I get so hacked off with you? It's this persistent dishonesty. It's not mistakes. It's not making an error. It's not forgetting. It's doing something you've been told about repeatedly where you are smart enough to understand the objection. If you were a child, I might understand this behaviour, but in an adult it's pretty sad.

[Clanad]

What is it you don't understand about the definition of cutting and pasting? Your example had no quotation marks denoting it as having originated from someone else, much less any attribution.

Mine are always attributed and defined by quotation marks with the original source provided. You may not like it, but it's apparently done in scholarly circles all the time, at least in the many text books I own.

So... once again, it looks like we've reached the end of a name calling, fully disparging exchange with no really meaningful information provided...

I do note that the more vehement your accusations the less you answer any information provided, except to say it doesn't count because it was copied and attributed as to source.

Sorry we couldn't do better...

[WaldoMcFroog]

I'd already acknowledged it was a fair cop and you'd already sourced it. No wonder I was confused about what you could be referring to when you started banging on about some 'extensive quote'.

Mine was a simple, one sentence, uncontentious statement of a fact (even to a creationist) that could have come from a thousand and one places, used in context. It wasn't argument and it wasn't 'extensive' at least by any normal definition. It was fair enough that you called me on it, and I put my hands up.

Yours, by way of contrast, are out-of-context quotes and *whole arguments* copied from other people and presented as though they represent damning evidence against evolution. You have demonstrably not bothered to read in context, else you would know they are no such thing. You have repeatedly, over the years, had it explained to you why this is fundamentally dishonest yet persist. You have failed to admit any of this, not only here, but on the numerous occasions you have done it in the past.

I shouldn't have done my C&P, but to pretend there is anything close to equivalence with your own dishonesty is discombobulatingly daft.

Your response to this is to get petulant about name calling rather than address the basic fault on your part. It's sooooo unfair, isn't it?

[LazyGun]

Taxonomy and classifications change, almost daily, it seems, but I thought that tyrannosaurus forebears had been identified - tyrannosaurs are part of the Coelurisauria clade, with clearly identified, smaller precursors? Well, as clearly as an incomplete fossil record and changes in the defining characteristics that are used to determine clade, family, species etc?

As to the argument that evolution is untrue, or incorrect, because no new animal body plans have emerged -is that the argument? That because we do not see new types of primates with say, 4 arms, or 6 legs, evolution must be untrue?

Descent with modification, natural selection, explains the diversity as we see it. There is no scientific alternative that I am aware of - only Creationism, and the evidence to support creationism is absent.

And, just as an observation, C&P is a horrible way to conduct a debate. I personally would much prefer to see the posters own- word, summation of a point offered with a hyperlink rather than regurgitated verbiage, referenced or otherwise - The posts become too long and too dense to follow clearly.

[jomifl]

There a many reasons why some species are not well represented in the fossil record.
Firstly,If there is not a large population there will be little opportunity for fossilisation
Secondly, if a group of organisms is evolving quickly there will be few opportunities for fossilisation even if they are abundant.
Thirdly, some animals do not inhabit environments which are favourable for fossilisation. Acid soils and waters dissolve bones long before fossilization can take place.
Fourthly, smaller animals can be completely dismembered and their bones eaten by scavengers like hyaenas.
Fifthly, many fluvial deposits are re-worked by rivers such as in meander plains so that soft material such as bone would be eroded away or washed into the sea.

[Clanad]

Wally’s argument and accusation(s) seems to me to have all the classic ingredients of pot… kettle… black. But, no problem…

Jomfil[i and ]LazyGun’s[i] points are well made and emphasize, once again, that evolution has a myriad of uncertainties, ambiguities and continual changes (no pun intended). As previously with Wally, both are solicited to give their understanding of “species”.

I have no disagreement with “change over time”, but to apply such change to macroevolution and speciation is fraught with misunderstanding or outright fabrication (al la Nebraska Man, for one). It becomes, in reality, a philosophical basis for ones life as much as anything else. A World View, if you will.

My last effort at providing such discontinuities but misread by Wooly Wally and prompting this: “…out-of-context quotes and *whole arguments* copied from other people and presented as though they represent damning evidence against evolution. You have demonstrably not bothered to read in context, else you would know they are no such thing…” is a straw man in that I had (and have, yet again) read the entire article from which my original quote was taken. I discounted the rest of the article since it was an argument that was presented, primarily to discount research provided by earlier icons of evolutionary science, such Stephen Jay Gould and Nile Eldridge. In each case the author of this article engaged in suppositions and unfounded speculations that ended with this:


“The Cambrian explosion thus remains a mystery. The survival of the body plans that arose during that period seems, in reality, to tell us something important about the patterns of evolution. Working from the assumption that Cambrian life was extraordinarily diverse, Gould has suggested that chance-not natural selection played the larger role in detecting which evolutionary lineages survived and which became extinct. Yet the Cambrian fauna may have been less diverse than others have assumed.

Are the phylum level body plans, so ancient and so durable, truly the optimal solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction, reached through an early, fast bout of natural selection before development congealed? Or are they just random combinations of characters assembled by accidents of history? I think the best to be said for now is that there is some truth in both alternatives. Evolution at the species level continues unabated, but variation in the surviving body plans does not seem to occur. For whatever unknown reasons, there will probably never again be an explosion of animal diversity on the earth like the one that took place some time around the early Cambrian.” (Source: ibid )

Our presenter has argued himself in a circle. It’s possible that Mr. McFroog is the one that hadn’t read the extensive article?

I understand Lazy Gun’s argument against presenting in whole fashion the written record of other’s presentations… and I wish it wasn’t necessary… but, the alternative is only an interpretation of what I or any other observer “thinks” the original has said.

Lastly… what I’ve noticed in several of these exchanges is that any defense, no matter how well reasoned or supported, that invokes a Creator (which I did not) is immediately and vehemently attacked. So be it… but I’ve stated before, I don’t particularly like broccoli…but others do. It’s never occurred to me that the broccoli-eaters are any less intelligent than me or the general population. If asked why they like the green stuff… they will say it’s a good source of certain vitamins or some such indefinable (at least to me) value. Again, no reason to attack the person. But, any discussion concerning a Deity soon dwindles to the example provided by this thread. Reminds me of the statement that I saw recently… “He doesn’t believe in God and hates Him”…

Thank you all for allowing me a venue… we’ll try it again sometime.

[WaldoMcFroog]

I smell a weak attempt at retrospective rationalisation of your use of those quotes. Face it chum, none of them supported the position for which you used them.

But if we are to believe that you had read the articles prior to posting the quotes that, I note, appear in the same order as you posted them on multiple creationist websites, even down to including the source (I liked the way you implied you were being diligent by including those), perhaps you would be kind enough to explain the point of your quote about the amber?

You claim to have read these things in context from the original source before posting them. The source document unambiguously details how the amber did NOT have the traces of angiosperms from 200m years later, but from contemporary plants. So, what did you imagine you were proving with that quote given you posted it as evidence of things being out of sequence, when it clearly proved the opposite.

I am unable to square having read the full article with the use of the quote as evidence of your claim since it manifestly doesn't uphold the position in support of which you quoted it.

However, I *can* square not having read the quote in context with using it in support of the position you took, since out of context it appears to do so.

As for your extended whine about being picked on for your religious beliefs, I am happy to clarify that I pick on you for your continued dishonesty in how you defend it, not merely for ideologically-motivated beliefs for which there are no credible evidence per se.

For the record, I am happy to state that I hate God exactly as much as I hate Voldemort, Cthulhu and Captain Hook.