Do we have a good example of a putative ancestor for the dog and the bear? A transitional fossil, or the like?
Absolutely not.El_Machinae said:I would like to know if discrediting the Flood is sufficient to discredit Creationism?
Or can the Flood be assumed to not have happened when a Creationist defends Creationism?
Unaccountably, there doesn't seem to be too much easily accessible material on the origin of the Caniformia (the clade uniting dogs with the bear-seal-weasel group) online. However, a reasonable model for the common ancestor of dogs and bears may be the extinct Amphicyonidae, or "bear-dogs"; below is a reconstruction of one amphicyonid:El_Machinae said:Do we have a good example of a putative ancestor for the dog and the bear? A transitional fossil, or the like?
How many separate fossils? I don't know, but sufficient to errect 3 subfamilies, 17 genera, and 30+ species. You can find Amphicyon teeth to buy online (this is quite probably illegal, tho).El_Machinae said:How many samples of this Amphicyonidae have been found?
So does my brother, and he's not particularly closely related to dogs.ironduck said:It makes sense that seals are related to dogs because they bark!![]()
Whale evolution?carlosMM said:hm, how come the people who have to loudly preclaimed science is wrong can now not even answer a few simple questions about THEIR reasons for saying so?
classical_hero: will you please finally answer the whale questions?
The second in this transitional series is the 7-foot (2 m) long Ambulocetus natans (walking whale that swims). Like the secular media and more popular science journals, Teaching about Evolution often presents nice neat stories to readers, not the ins and outs of the research methodology, including its limitations. The nice pictures of Ambulocetus natans in these publications are based on artists' imaginations, and should be compared with the actual bones found! The difference is illustrated well in the article A Whale of a Tale?6 This article shows that the critical skeletal elements necessary to establish the transition from non-swimming land mammal to whale are (conveniently) missing (see diagram). Therefore, grand claims about the significance of the fossils cannot be critically evaluated. The evolutionary biologist Annalisa Berta commented on the Ambulocetus fossil:
Since the pelvic girdle is not preserved, there is no direct evidence in Ambulocetus for a connection between the hind limbs and the axial skeleton. This hinders interpretations of locomotion in this animal, since many of the muscles that support and move the hindlimb originate on the pelvis.
Finally, it is dated more recently (by evolutionary dating methods) than undisputed whales, so is unlikely to be a walking ancestor of whales.
So are you trying to convince me that the Pakietus are some sort "whale" predicessor? If so, then the next bit is relevant, if not then the alst bit is not needed. The last bit of that is very confusing.carlosMM said:You were asked, specifically, how many whale skeltons you had studied, how many fossil whales you had studied, what your training and experience in comparative vertebrate anatomy was in general, and which adaptations on the fossil whales (originally I was asking about Ambuloceutes, now let me broaden that to the second whale you also posted, too) make you convinced they were no less effective at terrestrial locomotion than their next kin, whom scientist regard as pure landlubbers.
So from you expert opinion you basically disagree with the person who first discovered the fossil and had way more time to look at them than anyone would. Plus this quote would go against any supposed whale features, because these creatures are mainly land based, which whales are not and they share very little in common to even make them an ancestor of the whale, which is why it is a whale of a tale.Taken together, the features of the skull indicate that pakicetids were terrestrial, and the locomotor skeleton displays running adaptations. Some features of the sense organs of pakicetids are also found in aquatic mammals, but they do not necessarily imply life in water. Pakicetids were terrestrial mammals, no more amphibious than a tapir.
Both morphological and molecular data are vulnerable to the problem of homoplasiesreversals to ancestral conditions or parallel changes in different lineages that can camouflage the true phylogeny . For example, the ear region of the skull, traditionally considered to be a good source of highly stable characters, shows some glaring homoplasies among the ungulates and cetaceans.
In other words, the supposed whale transition is not at all clearunlike the propaganda pronouncements intended for public consumption.
Since the pelvic girdle is not preserved, there is no direct evidence in Ambulocetus for a connection between the hind limbs and the axial skeleton. This hinders interpretations of locomotion in this animal, since many of the muscles that support and move the hindlimb originate on the pelvis.
is taken out of context. Whilst he does say that Pakicetids were land based animals this is unsurprising given that mammals evolved on land ie the first whale ancestors would be land based (pakicetus), becoming amphibious (ambulocetus) and then finally living fully in the sea (modern whales). There is nothing in the nature paper that contradicts this hypothesis.Taken together, the features of the skull indicate that pakicetids were terrestrial, and the locomotor skeleton displays running adaptations. Some features of the sense organs of pakicetids are also found in aquatic mammals, but they do not necessarily imply life in water. Pakicetids were terrestrial mammals, no more amphibious than a tapir.
I hope you do have enough, since there are other flood stories from other Religions and Cultures. MesoAmerica had their flood story, China had their flood story. The thing I cant get around is that I know Noah's Flood is plausable because it would have taken place in a overexadurated hydrological or meteorlogical (possibly combination of both) with one with a lake that is below the sealevel that floods when a natural dam blocking a large body of water breaks or an overexadurated account of a sea stranded sea captan and his crew that were swept away in a rainstorm.Perfection said:I'll agree that the flood is not neccesary for creationism. However, if a Creationist believes in a flood story I see no problem ruthlessly shreding it to bits.
That's falseclassical_hero said:
A.This is the reconstruction of Ambulocetus, ‘at the end of the power stroke during swimming’, by Thewissen et al.
B. These are the actual bones that we have of this creature The stippled bones were all that were found. And the bones coloured red were found 5 m above the rest. With the ‘additions’ removed there really isn’t much left of Ambulocetus!
As you can see, that the evidence about what this creature was like is shakey for anyone to say exactly what it did with so much missing. We are missing the pevlic bone, most of it's spine and we are missing the shoulder bone, so we cannot know if the front leg has not more bones in it.
No, Carlos is talking about Ambulocetes, which isn't a pakicetid.classical_hero said:Also about Pakicetus.
So are you trying to convince me that the Pakietus are some sort "whale" predicessor? If so, then the next bit is relevant, if not then the alst bit is not needed. The last bit of that is very confusing.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v413/n6853/full/413277a0.html
jafink said:an omnipotent God who loves and cares about me, even if it isn't true, I think I will have had a much more peaceful and happy existence than if I didn't. And because of that I would like to ask you this; if the Earth was not created, then there certainly won't be an Afterlife, so why are you wasting your valuable time trying to prove the beliefs of others are incorrect?