New Transitional Fossil Found

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

My, what sharp teeth you have, Grandma Ventastega.
Image Credit: Philip Renne/AP

Admittedly, the word "transitional" in the title of this post is superfluous, since every fossil (and every living organism for that matter) is in a state of evolutionary transition. This fossil find is pretty spectacular, however.

Scientists have recently discovered in Latvia the 365 million-year-old skull, shoulder, collarbone, forearm and pelvis of an aquatic 4-limbed creature they named Ventastega curonica. They've found fossils of the same species before, but have only recently started seriously researching them. Although they consider it an evolutionary dead end from the late Devonian Period, it is an important find as it helps fill the gaps in our understanding of the evolution of some species of fish into tetrapods (four-legged animals). Amphibians, birds and mammals all descended from the early tetrapods.

Scientists now have examples of a creature that was more fish than tetrapod (the fascinating and even more historic find Tiktaalik roseae) and a creature that was more tetrapod than fish (Ventastega). Actually, Tiktaalik is considered slightly more advanced than Ventastega, even though it is an older species - it lived 10 million years before Ventastega. This might seem odd, but it is typical of the Devonian Period, which was full of species in different stages of transition and evolutionary advancement.

According to evolutionary theory, all tetrapods (including humans) are descended from species similar to Tiktaalik and Ventastega. Think of all the billions of random genetic mutations and the colossal amount of natural selection that occurred during the process of evolving from "them" to "us". To me, anyway, it's all quite awe-inspiring. Normally, when people look at artists' renditions of creatures like these, they do not realize they are looking at their great-great-great (times many millions) grandmother. However, that's exactly what they're doing!

In my view, this astounding line of descent is much more indicative of the omnipotence and omniscience of God than the Six Days of Creation described in Genesis. My question, though, is this: When, in this marvelous progression, did the human soul come about? Unless we can someday, somehow, measure and quantify the soul, and see it in the fossil record, we'll never know the answer. To understate, that's not likely to happen, and that's fine by me. Faith doesn't need to be poked and prodded with the measuring tools of science, although scientific discoveries routinely compel the faithful of reasonable mind to re-examine the wisdom of literally interpreting portions of their scriptures.

Sources: Devonian Times, MSNBC