Basic and Remedial Fossil Identification

the average person doesn't read paleontological journals. it's not an issue of it being inaccessible to the public. if you can't get it over the internet, wander into the local university library, and try from there. if they don't have the physical issue of nature or science or some of the more technical journals, they probably have a subscription to something like jstor or lexis-nexus or whatever the appropriate service is for such things over the internet. it's not like they're hidden in a dark room somewhere. it's just that, frankly, it goes way, way over the heads of the average person. it goes over the heads of most college-educated people, too. afterall, they are technical journals. it takes a certain knowledge of the field to even understand the jargon.can you imagine trying to read a journal on combinatorics or graph theory without having even passed calculus? i've taken two semesters of calc -- and i can't even begin to approach my own father's doctoral thesis in graph theory. i can't even tell you what it's on, or explain the theorems he proved in it. every year, i work at a graph theory conference, and sometimes go talks. i told my father one year that it made me feel stupid -- and he said "i don't get half the stuff these people are talking about either. we just go and listen and try to follow along as best as we can." it's not any different for other academic field, including biology, geology, and paleontology. it's pretty heady stuff -- it's just not for the average person. that's why people devote their entire lives to studying these things. it's not easy.what you're essentially asking for is a contradiction. you want something technically specific, but dumbed down for the public. if i give you a stephen jay gould book, or even the book i recommended christian (full of skeletal drawings) you'll look at it and say "not enough actual evidence." and if i hand you a copy of the journal of paleontology you'll say "but that's not everything all in one place" or maybe even "i don't understand it, or trust the scientists' conclusions even though i don't know what they're saying!"what you really want is something that contains the entire accumulation of the world's paleontological knowledge, in depth, but understandable by a single average human being. and unfortunately (for the yec view) that's simply an impossibility. we have far, far too many paleontologists who have worked in the past, and are working today, and far, far too many fossils for it to even be readable by a single person. and you can't have something that's both technical, and plebian.

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hey, look what i found.[added by edit:] i'm checking, and i only get 5 specimens for archaeopteryx (and i know there are 7 "complete" specimens, and one feather), meaning the database is not complete. but it's sort of what you're looking for, i think.Edited by arachnophilia, : abe

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or know of resources the average person doesn't. see above post.

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what? why?i'm totally digging this. wanna see a map of the global distribution of every tyrannosaurid? i'm quite impressed with that.

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well, uh, you have to know what "taxon" means. and from there, you have to know a taxon or two. again, it takes some degree of biological knowledge to work. personally, i know it's incomplete, but i'm getting a real kick out of this site right now. type "tyrannosauroidea" into the "name" box, and hit "search." it'll bring up a page that says "classification." at the top are a bunch of choices. one is "map." it will show you, roughly, all of the locations tyrannosauroids have been found. then if you click "age range and collections" it will display all of the tyrannosauroid speciments it has cataloged. there are quite a few.you can get a little more specific. if you type in "tyrannosaurus rex" into the search box, you can get a map that just comprises the western portion of this country, and shows the distribution is better detail. and you can get vaguer, too, to a point. but certain catalogs seem to be incomplete.Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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lol, i hope you realize that's a rather funny demand.i'm not sure how high i can get you on the list. go the search menu, and select "classification of taxa in groups" and type in "animalia" (ie: all animals). have fun while it takes a few minutes to load. you might wanna try limiting that to "chordata" (ie: everything with a spinal chord/vertberates).similarly, if you have a classification open, you can click on any group you in the heirarchy you want to see, and it will load a new classification. from there, select "related taxa" and click "view classification of included taxa" and it will load the tree. dinosauria.

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these guys, apparently. oh, and these guys too.it's not an issue of it not existing (or rather, not being worked on), it's yet another issue of creationists just not looking hard enough. i'm suprised you let her trick you, crash. Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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laughably incomplete. but still incredibly impressive nonetheless.i think faith is off trying to comprehend what 582,000 specimens looks like.

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yes, i think you are. but i think what i gave you will suffice for the next century or so as they work on it. it is, but most of it's ripped off of something else. not a lot of people contributing to the world of mp3 piracy and viral videos are working paleontologists... the ratio of paleontologists to non-paleontologists on the web is probably about the same as everywhere else. the facts are presented in the articles. i mean, the real articles, the ones in the technical journals. like i said before, you want something that by definition is a contradiction. maybe it's the "would-be" that's the problem. devote a lifetime to actually studying paleontology and tell me what you come away with. i'm really not trying to sound elitist here, but science doesn't exist to preach. if you'd like to understand it, you have to study it if you want to understand it. they don't hand out pamphelets. and it's a simple fact of life that the majority of people will never go in depth into science.you can't expect the gratuitous details you seem to be after from something you want watered down so you can also understand it. you either study it, or you get the general popularist discovery-channel-version. but it's far, far too large of a field for you get both the macroscopic and microscopic views at the same time.

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...because people are trying to get religion taught in schools. if creationism['s attempt to get into schools] went away tomorrow, so would the "preaching" of evolution. people spread misinformation about science, and scientists often feel the need to correct that misinformation. again, this stuff isn't exactly state secret. go take three semesters of biology, three semesters of geology, and then go take a few paleontology classes. if you keep going at it, eventually you might get to masters level, or even doctoral level -- and deal with the information yourself. even collect it, in the field if you'd like.if that's too much, there are a number of technical journals.but you don't want to understand this -- otherwise, you'd be going down one or both of those routes. you want to complain about how the information isn't available, en total, with excruciating detail, explained in terms a 4 year old can understand. i'm sorry -- it takes effort. if you're not willing to put in the effort required to study something -- don't complain that someone else has digested it for you. it's really one or the other, and i wish you'd stop whining to us about the choices you make. nevermind that it lists half a million individual specimens and which specific sub-strata they are found it, and where specifically they were found in the world down to precise geographic coordinates. it even lists what kind of rock, and which specific formation they were found it. so no, that's not useful at all. it appears that you have no will to even try. nothing will satisfy you, not even exactly what you are looking for.i'm unimpressed, faith.Edited by arachnophilia, : editted brackets for clarityEdited by arachnophilia, : typo

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i think robin was referring to something that bears properties of both reptiles and mammals, not a direct line from lizard to cows.and anyhow, that would be inaccurate. mammals, cladistically, diverged lower in the tree than reptiles. technically, lizards and cows came from a common (amniote) ancestor. the very first "mammals" were quite lizard like, and began with critters that looked like this:this is more on the "lizard" spectrum, but you'll notice a couple of things if you're a skilled anatomist or paleontologist: it's a synapsid, like a mammal -- modern reptiles are sauropsids (anapsids, like turtles, or diapsids like crocs, dinos, and birds). the other important feature is that, like its name "dimetrodon" says in latin, it has two types of teeth. no true reptiles have any more than one type of teeth. only mammals do.the fin on its back is probably an early adaptation for regulation of body temperature. you can also notice the vaguely mammalian shape of the skull.i'm not sure we could say this is our direct ancestor, but it's pretty close to the mammal/reptile line. could you direct me to that?Edited by arachnophilia, : image width

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again, still not totally accurate. mammals did not evolve from reptiles. they evolved from pre-reptile amniotes that were very reptilian in many ways.and i'm not sure if it's the most complete. i haven't looked into it much, but i feel confident in saying that dinosaur-bird transition is so much more complete that nobody even feels there is a transition at all anymore, because birds ARE dinosaurs. and even if i'm wrong on that account, dino-bird would still give reptilian-mammal a run for its money.

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well, it makes sense. i'm just quibbling over a technicality. mammals and reptiles diverged from the same ancestor, not mammals from reptiles. if we were to draw the diagram, you wouldn't even be able to tell -- that "reptile" i posted, for instance, is not a reptile. it's actually more closely related to mammals than it is to reptiles. it's just very close to the common ancestor, and so still looks very reptilian.but since it's a synapsid, and not a sauropsid, it's not a reptile. fixed.

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