Fossil Yields Surprise Kin of Crocodiles | NYT

[Ediacara]

Fossil Yields Surprise Kin of Crocodiles


By CARL ZIMMER
Published: January 26, 2006

Scientists have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a sixfoot-long, two-legged dinosaur, but is actually an ancient relative of alligators and crocodiles.

The discovery is a striking example of how different animals can evolve the same kind of body over and over again.

For almost 60 years, the 210-million-year-old fossil has been hiding in plain sight. It was lodged in a slab of rock dug up in 1947 in New Mexico by a team led by Edward Colbert, a paleontologist at the museum.

More at the New York Times

[bballny]

1. Impossible

No such thing as evolution.

[htuttle]

2. Considering the fractal nature of the construction of organic life forms..

...the idea that nature uses the same forms over and over again on different branches of evolution, while amazing, shouldn't be too shocking.

Life seems to be self-similar up and down the scale, and does tend to reuse the solutions on a macro scale that it uses on a micro scale.

Do I have any idea HOW this works or the mechanism that's used? Hell no. Just seems sort of intuitive to me -- an expectation I have, I guess.

[Nothing Without Hope]

3. Extremely cool! A toothless biped with air sacs in the vertebrae!

Amazing convergence over 80 million years. Nice that they named it after Georgia O'Keefe too. Such a surprising, quirky animal, overturning prior conceptions and "hiding" in already-collected slabs for decades - surely she would approve.