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By Michael White | June 18th 2009 03:21 PM | 6 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist


... Full Bio

More incredible finds from the Messel Pit:




"These 49 million-year-old freshwater turtle fossils are believed to have died of poisoning during copulation."

(Photograph: Jonathan Blair/Corbis, published at The Guardian Online.)



Comments

Hank's picture
Rant

They find a lot of interesting stuff in Messel, I just remain more skeptical when I see something from there because they block access to all but employees of one museum - and totalitarianism goes badly even in science.    Just since our existence we've had Ida with a rather suspect lineage, supposedly South American cashews from 47 million years ago in the ground there, and a thousand other things that claim to up end something or another. 

You'd think if it were this treasure trove of science, and if the Senckenberg cares about science, they'd let people see/verify all this stuff before the book and TV specials come out declaring them the greatest things ever.

/Rant

That's a cool fossil!

adaptivecomplexity's picture
It's true - the fossils are great; the stories cooked up to go along with them - I'm not so sure.  That poisoning scenario keeps coming up, but I'm not sure how you verify a claim like that, even if there were signs of methane or whatever in the sediments - how do you know the gas eruption didn't occur after these things were already dead?

Hank's picture
Likelihood tests plus a 25% confidence interval buried way down in the notes?

Fossil Huntress's picture
Nice to see others questioning Messel. Aside from the peculiar access, the bigger story is that many of the finest specimens, including Ida the faux missing  link, get locked away in private collections. Everyone has breezed over the fact that Ida sat on a shelf unnoticed for more than a decade.

adaptivecomplexity's picture
And somehow half of the plate Ida is in was sold somewhere separately, with falsified features. Bizarre.

Fossil Huntress's picture

The creationists are taking that one and running.  At least it didn't take 40 years to figure it out a la Piltdown man...



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