I like how it's turned into a good belief debate. Now like most ordinary Homo sapiens sapiens I do believe in the basis of the theory of evolution. You only have to see some of my friends (and perhaps even myself) to realise that the genepool has not evolved greatly from the earliest hominids. Plus fossils are great. When you find them in a nice strata you've got a reasonably accurate age to within several million years or so.
Now the problem with Ida (the wee little monkeys affectionate if not silly name as she was probably known as ugga during her life time) was brought from a private seller at a fair. Let's be honest ... a flea market. I used to go to the fossil and rock fairs at Bakewell only to find that about 20% of the stuff was fake. Now! We know that they are real bones, but little has been said about the resin. It's been cast in resin, so where does the fossil start and end and where does the resin start and end? They also say that it must have come from such and such quarry because it was cast in resin! Mad. Surely anyone can cast in resin?? No work was done on the crystalline fossil matrix to provenance it. Dating was apparantly taken through isotopes (whether they used carbon 14 or not I'm sure - they were very sketchy), but also if the things being sunk in a huge blob of yellow plastic then surely there's going to be interference to the date!
However the find in itself is remarkable. It's definately mammal, a fossil and really really old, but the distortion of the bones through time and pressure do not allow them to say what's a nail and what's a claw. I've dug up many bodies and bones in the past and the first thing that would have been disturbed on that little crittur as it lay on the bottom of a lake would be the metatarsels and metacarpels if so much as a fish farted on its way past.
Right I'm going to do some work now and perhaps find myself a tree to swing from and evolve in! (I wonder whether the little feller was any good with flint and steel?)
Now the problem with Ida (the wee little monkeys affectionate if not silly name as she was probably known as ugga during her life time) was brought from a private seller at a fair. Let's be honest ... a flea market. I used to go to the fossil and rock fairs at Bakewell only to find that about 20% of the stuff was fake. Now! We know that they are real bones, but little has been said about the resin. It's been cast in resin, so where does the fossil start and end and where does the resin start and end? They also say that it must have come from such and such quarry because it was cast in resin! Mad. Surely anyone can cast in resin?? No work was done on the crystalline fossil matrix to provenance it. Dating was apparantly taken through isotopes (whether they used carbon 14 or not I'm sure - they were very sketchy), but also if the things being sunk in a huge blob of yellow plastic then surely there's going to be interference to the date!
However the find in itself is remarkable. It's definately mammal, a fossil and really really old, but the distortion of the bones through time and pressure do not allow them to say what's a nail and what's a claw. I've dug up many bodies and bones in the past and the first thing that would have been disturbed on that little crittur as it lay on the bottom of a lake would be the metatarsels and metacarpels if so much as a fish farted on its way past.
Right I'm going to do some work now and perhaps find myself a tree to swing from and evolve in! (I wonder whether the little feller was any good with flint and steel?)