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A year in review - Remember Ida?
Dec 27
Remember Ida (Eye-da), the fossil discovery announced last May by Oslo paleontologist Jorn Hurum? It came with all its hoopla, complete with book and a TV documentary . The publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans.
Interestingly, the suggestion that Ida was specifically related to the higher primates was actually a minority view from the start. So, it was no surprise that scientific reviewers asked Hurum and his colleages to tone down their original claims that the fossil was on the human evolutionary line.
Chris Beard curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Eric Sargis an anthropology professor at Yale and Dr Erik Seiffert from Stony Brook University protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative. Over the past year, new analysis supports their reaction. Here’s what they found.
Ida's overall proportions and anatomy resemble that of a lemur which live today in Madagascar, Africa and Asia. If Ida is related to lemars she cannot be related to humans.
The fact that she retains simple incisors rather than a full-fledged toothcomb (like lemurs today), indicates that Ida belongs somewhere closer to the base of living lemurs far removed from monkeys.
Variation of tooth formation should not be surprising or unusual since God created creatures like Lemurs after there own kind.
Ironically the lemur-like creature was named “Darwinius”, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s publication “The Origin of Species.” And yet Seiffert comments the fossil is “surprisingly uninformative. The skull is crushed and the ankle damaged, he says – two areas of the body crucial to understanding early primate evolution.” Even John Fleagle of State University of New York at Stony Brook said the analysis provides “a pretty weak link”
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Terms like “uninformative” and “a pretty weak link” are not words you want to hear for something named “Darwinius”.
The 95% complete fossil was found in Germany, in an area called the Messel Pit. This quarry has yelded fossilized snakes, fish, beetles, bats, turtles, types of birds, even a miniature horse. All fully formed, as would be expected if interpreting from the biblical worldview.
The Messel pit was once a lush tropical rain forest, a green canopy of trees that stretch as far as the eye could see, a definate indicator of the pre-flood world.
The fact that Ida is 95% complete raises questions as to how it became so preserved. Perhaps the flood catastrophe mentioned in Genesis 7 could give us a clue.
The discovery of Ida can be best summed up by paleontologist Elwyn Simons of North Carolina’s Duke University. “It’s an extraordinary complete, wonderful specimen, but it’s not telling us too much that we didn’t know before.”
This is especially true for those who side on creation.
Creation Speaker: Book Larry Dye the Creation Guy for a creation seminar at your Church or organization
Tour: Book a tour at the Creation Discovery Centre, a creation learning museum located in Bow Island, Alberta Canada.
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