From:    Chris Colby
Subject: fossil, schmossil... what about the bug!?

Organization: animal -- coelomate -- deuterostome
From: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu (Chris Colby)
Message-ID: 97661@bu.edu
Newsgroups: talk.origins

In article <1992Oct5.174235.18587@news.nd.edu> scharle@lukasiewicz.cc.nd.edu
(Scharle) writes:

>    In a recent issue of Science, there is a review article and a
>research article about a dryopithecine fossil (Dryopithecus branchoi)

Bah, another rock... who cares? Turn to page 1933 in same issue and
read something interesting 8-) DeSalle, et. al., have sequenced DNA
from a 25-30 million year old termite encased in amber. They then
dumped the sequence into a computer program that draws phylogenies
and guess what? The "fossil" DNA clustered with DNA from a morpholo-
gically similar termite species living today. You know, sort of
like the theory of evolution predicts. Question to creationists:
do you have a theory that predicts anything? Just wondering.

Of course, the article deals mainly with using this information
to address a scientific question, not as a "here's more evidence
for evolution" sort of thing. No real scientist take creationism
seriously. The type of termite found was thought to be near the
proposed phylogenetic split between termites and cockroaches and the
authors use the data to help get a better idea of the pattern
of relationship of between these groups. The groups results support
the idea that this type of termite is not a "missing link" between
these two groups as a few others had previously suggested given
their analysis of morphological data.

There is also a News article that reports (amidst some _Jurassic
Park_ nonsense) that preliminary results indicate that some
guy has got DNA from a 200 million year old fish and some woman
is trying to get DNA from 400 million year old brachiopods!

REFERENCE:
DeSalle, et. al., 1992, DNA sequences from a fossil termite in
Oligo-Miocene amber and their phylogenetic implications, Science
257: 1933-1936

>Tom Scharle                |cm65n6@irishmvs(Bitnet)

Chris Colby   ---      email: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu     ---
"'My boy,' he said, 'you are descended from a long line of determined,
resourceful, microscopic tadpoles--champions every one.'"
		--Kurt Vonnegut from "Galapagos"