Friday, February 4, 2011

Cretaceous Insect Reveals No Evolution In 100 Million Years



Science Daily: Rare Insect Fossil Reveals 100 Million Years of Evolutionary Stasis.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2011) — Researchers have discovered the 100 million-year-old ancestor of a group of large, carnivorous, cricket-like insects that still live today in southern Asia, northern Indochina and Africa. The new find, in a limestone fossil bed in northeastern Brazil, corrects the mistaken classification of another fossil of this type and reveals that the genus has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

2 comments:

Jeffery Keown said...

Punctuated Equilibrium. Do you understand English? I swear, you grasp at anything that comes along, using it to flog evolution like a Late Georgian Schoolboy, without offering evidence for the change we do see over millions of years.

Other studies have determined that the region where the fossil was found was most likely an arid or semi-arid monsoonal environment during the Early Cretaceous Period, Heads said, "suggesting that the habitat preferences of Schizodactylus have changed little in over 100 million years."

In smaller words, if the environment doesn't change, it's unlikely that the critters will change.

What is the cause of speciation and physiological change, if not evolution?

Fungus the Photo! said...

Or the dating of the fossil is wrong?

A simple question: can amber last that length of time?