Scientists announce 47 million-year-old find amid media hoopla. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30826552/?GT1=43001 Abner
Wow... that's neat. Although I expect uproar to follow from religious groups. When I'm teaching about the appearance of humans in my world history class, it amazes me how ignorant the kids are of evolution and even creationism. -Matt
"The lesser part was restored and, in the process, partly fabricated to make it look more complete." (emphasis added) It does have the makings of a debate. Would evolutionists be accomodating to a creationist who partly fabricated a religious manuscript?
The difference is that no one is trying to conceal that parts of this fossil were fabricated for display. This particular fossil was so well-preserved that we can determine the animal's last meal and the sorts of injuries it had suffered during its life. We even have a fairly good idea of what caused the animal's death. Preparing the fossil for display doesn't diminish the scientific importance of finding a 47-million year old ancestor of most of the primate family, especially when the bones that have been fabricated are documented and easily distinguished from the actual fossil itself. Missing bones are fabricated for fossils intended for display all the time. They are recreated using plaster casts of bones from other examples of the same species, or their structure is inferred from the positions, sizes, and shapes of other nearby bones and an approximation is made. Just because the T. Rex at your local natural history museum has a few vertebrae made of plaster doesn't change the fact that similar beasts did roam the earth around 65 million years ago. On the other hand, you have the Gospel of Mark. In the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known complete copy of the Christian Bible, Mark ends with the three women finding the empty tomb, encountering an Angel, and leaving afraid. In today's Bible, Mark has 11 additional verses that describe the resurrected Christ returning to His followers and eventually ascending to heaven. If Mark the Evangelist stopped writing after Chapter 16, Verse 8, then doesn't that make verses 9-20 a "fabrication"? Should we dimiss the New Testament, then?
The related paper that was released yesterday can be seen in full here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005723 However there is some scientific debate over the uniqueness of this fossil as noted here: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/519/1