@hingehead,
Quote: But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction.
Whats really interesting is that the "predictions" are many. They test the concept of falsifiability . When Neil Shubin and Ted Daeschler (the two prinicples of this discovery) began their original quest, they had seen the various lobe finned fish whose fossils littered the lower to mid Devonian rocks. They saw the lobe fins and then, just a few feetnhigher in the geologic section, there appeared the real early amphibians
Ichthyostega with feet and rticulated heqds and sporting that" amphibiany look".
Ted and Neil, looked at the GS geological maps of the world and theorized that,
"If transitional fossils exist, they should occupy a short sequence of sediment of the early mid Devonian marine rocks" WSo they looked to see, on the map,
"where on earth do these type sediments reside?"
They came up with candidate sites and visited a few (UK, Northern USS Appalachians, N Africa, Greenland etc).
They hd to apply for funding to actually plan an expedition to find any transitional fossils that span the time between the ages of the earliest appearnaces of bony fish and amphibians.
They got their funding in the late 1990's and then mounted what became a many yer hunt.
They were a;lmost out of funding in the field season of 2003 and got a small expetnsion because they felt that they had certain fossils from a site in Ellsmere Island.
Theyd been hunting this area for about 3 years every summer for about 6 weeks (Both Neil and TEd had many other duties and responsibilities to families and careers.
They stuck to it and were going to exhaust their time and money in the 2004 field seson.
When they found the fossil that they later named Tiktaliik, it took several months before they got the fossil clear of the rock matrix.
Now, several other scientists, working in an earlier Devonian unit of SE Asia, have reported a possible (even earlier) candidate fossil "footprints "found in lacustrine sedimentary rocks. Whether these footprints will upend and depose Tiktaliik is unknown because there are severl species of early fisl that were able to affect footprint like fossils by tentacle-like appendages that allowed the fish to brace itself on sandy bottoms against a current.
Still, the dogged perserverance that Ted and Neil showed (I recall when Ted, a senior paleontologist in the Phila Academy of SCience) would be gone for those several summers so he would miss the usual meetings and conference because he was living in a tent along with maybe 15 others , up in a remote section of the Canadian Devonian section, JUT BECAUSE they had an idea that they could fill in a "Gap" in paleontological knowledge.
Do Creationists EVER show that kind of devotion to their science denialim? Not that Im aware. All I can recall from the historical records of "Creation scientists" is trying to poo poo any findings that otherwise clarify the growing fossil record. Finding another transitional fossil is a serious blow to the Creationist worldview.
According to what the Creationists believe, the fossil record should be a jumble of fosils of everything living at the same time and their one attempt at anything scientific is that they try to use Stokes Law to "prove" that all these animals that have left fossils were all just victims of the great Flood of the Bible.
Theres no elegant order in that thinking,and, so far, the fossil record is showing itself to be ordered with the oldest stuff at the bottom of the record and we see no "early appearances" of modern derived species at the bottom of the Grand Canyonor the Flinders Ridge.
