Lots of news on the recently discovered “fishpod” creature officially named Tiktaalik out there today:
“Tiktaalik substantially narrows the gap in the fossil record of the fish-tetrapod transition,” says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden.
”Tiktaalik was probably an unwieldy swimmer,” says John Maisey, a palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It probably lived in shallow waters, says Maisey, only hauling itself on to land temporarily to escape predators. “Tetrapods did not so much conquer the land, as escape from the water,” he says.
It’s one of the best examples of a transitional fossil found to date and it’ll be interesting to watch the Creationists/IDiots try to find a way to dismiss it. I suspect most won’t work too hard at it, but some will come up with some creative excuses. When you’re Reality Immune it’s pretty easy to ignore what’s right in front of you.
Posted on 04/07/2006 at 09:34 PM 
Posted on 04/08/2006 at 02:34 AM 
Eh, they’ll just harp on about how there needs to be more “transitional species,” the fossil record is too incomplete to prove anything, blah blah blah, reductio ad infinitum(?).