Re: Barney Rubble, dinosaurs and fundy-fun

In message <1142264962.380225.88120@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, The
Last Conformist <andreasj@xxxxxxxxx> writes

"To complicate matters, researchers reported in the April 18, 2002
issue of Nature, one of the premier science journals in the world, that
they now have determined that the "last common ancestor of extant
primates" existed (as dated by evolutionary dating methods) 85 million
years ago (Tavaré, et al., 2002). Since dinosaurs are supposed to have
died out 65 million years ago, that means the primate would have lived
with the dinosaurs for at least 20 million years. One of the co-authors
of the Nature paper, Christophe Soligo of London's Natural History
Museum, stated in regard to the find: "What we demonstrate is that
modern orders of mammals appeared well before dinosaurs disappeared..."
(see "Primate Ancestor Lived with Dinos," 2002). So much for the belief
that mammals evolved "just a tad later" than the dinosaurs. "

Try as I might, I can't figure out how the last sentence relates to the
rest of the paragraph.


As quoted, it appears to be an attempt to refute a strawman. It has long
been known that mammals existed long before K/T boundary. Whether
primates overlapped in time is, IMO, an open question - there are no
unequivocal pre-Tertiary primate fossils, and I don't trust molecular
dates to that degree - but other mammals were certainly present in the
Cretaceous and earlier (see the "Jurassic beaver" recently mentioned
onfroup).
--
alias Ernest Major


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