Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Hi all! We have been experiencing an issue on site where threads have been missing the latest postings. The platform host Vanilla are working on this issue. A workaround that has been used by some is to navigate back from 1 to 10+ pages to re-sync the thread and this will then show the latest posts. Thanks, Mike.
Hi there,
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest

Quite the 'Appendage' you have there...

  • 06-02-2009 8:21pm
    #1
    Galvasean
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭


    Speaks for itself... :o

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/02/090205-great-appendage-picture.html
    February 5, 2009--An ancient creature with bulging eyes and a "great appendage" could be a missing link in the evolution of grasping claws, according to a new study.

    The new fossil species Schinderhannes bartelsi—seen above in fossil form and in an artist's reconstruction—resembles an ancient group of animals that had pairs of large, interconnected limbs on their heads, a configuration known among paleontologists as the great appendage.

    Modern scorpions and other arthropods often have a grasping claw that looks like it might have evolved from the great appendage. But until now the fossil record had suggested that animals with this distinctive limb had all gone extinct in the middle of the Cambrian period, creating an evolutionary dead end.

    Schinderhannes was found in a German quarry within a slate deposit that dates to 390 million years ago—100 million years after the great-appendage group was supposedly wiped off the map.

    Described in this week's issue of the journal Science, the fossil could offer valuable clues to solving the long-standing dispute over how arthropods are related to one another.

    "Sadly, the quarry from which this fabulous material comes has closed for economic reasons," study co-author Derek Briggs, of Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, said in a statement.

    "So the only additional specimens that are going to appear now are items that are already in collectors' hands, and that may not have been fully prepared or realized for what they are."

    —Victoria Jaggard

    Illustration courtesy Elke Groning; fossil pictures courtesy Gabriele Kuhl

    090205-great-appendage_big.jpg


Advertisement