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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (163797)	7/23/2001 10:46:51 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 769667

Fossil of oldest known crustacean found July 19, 2001 Posted: 5:58 PM EDT (2158 GMT) WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Limestone deposits in England have yielded the fossilized remains of the oldest known crustacean, with the tiny animal's soft parts, including the appendages with which it ate, preserved in extraordinary detail, scientists said on Thursday. The crustacean, less than one 50th of an inch (half a millimeter) long, dwelt in the ocean 511 million years ago and was an ancient relative of the crustaceans that live today, including crabs, lobsters, shrimps and crayfish, said Mark Williams, British Geological Survey paleontologist. The discovery could force scientists to re-evaluate current beliefs about the emergence of many complex organisms. The creature lived more than 50 million years before the first fish appeared and 280 million years before the first dinosaur. Williams and colleagues David Siveter of Britain's University of Leicester and Dieter Waloszek of the University of Ulm in Germany retrieved the fossil from rocks in Shropshire near the Welsh border dating from the early Cambrian period -- a time that bore witness to an explosion of marine life. Williams said the team brought some of the rocks back to the laboratory, where they used acetic acid to dissolve the limestone and leave behind tiny fossils. The researchers found two specimens of what they called a phosphatocopid crustacean. "They are very, very small fossils. But even though they're so small, they've got all the morphology that we need to work out that they're crustaceans," Williams, whose findings appear in the journal Science, said in a telephone interview with Reuters. Generally, only an animal's hard parts, such as shell, bone and teeth, are preserved in fossils. This animal's shell is preserved. But more astonishingly, its soft parts are delicately cast in calcium phosphate, enabling the researchers to describe details of its body and limbs in three dimensions. "Very few fossils of this great antiquity reveal so much detail or can be interpreted with such certainty," said Richard Fortey of Oxford University in London in a commentary accompanying the research. Williams said the appendages the crustacean used to bring food to its mouth are preserved, as well as an antenna and parts of the body. The arrangement of head appendages is typical of crustaceans, he added. It had a spherical shell, with its legs and head protruding below. Williams said it resembled the juvenile form of today's barnacles, which also are crustaceans. The creature lived millions of years before the oldest previously discovered crustacean. "It is definitely the oldest crustacean ever found," he said. The seas were teeming with life 511 million years ago. The tiny crustacean lived alongside the trilobites (horseshoe crab-like creatures), various worms, jelly fish, primitive mollusks, snails and other organisms. "In the early Cambrian, what you find is a sudden burst of fossils all around the world at about the same time," Williams said. "There have been arguments about whether this represents rapid evolution of the main animal groups that we see today over a relatively short period or whether there was evolution before that to produce all these animal groups, but the fossil record is just not preserving those fossils." He said the presence of a very advanced creature such as this crustacean suggests that "there must have been a period of evolution prior to this so-called Cambrian explosion. So it's important in terms of our ideas of when modern kinds of organisms started to evolve." Fortey agreed that if crustaceans were present in the early Cambrian, it becomes "perfectly plausible" that the fuse for this primordial explosion in animal types actually had been lit in the Precambrian period before 545 million years ago.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (163797)	7/23/2001 11:09:05 PM
From: ThirdEye	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

You are right about at least one thing, Thomas. The Pope is about as anti-marxist as you can get.(It was CK who called the protesters in Seattle, Quebec and Genoa marxist pigs) But he also happens to favor what you might call economic justice, as indicated in his statement. Sure, the Pope is also a politician so he can't use any language that could be considered inflammatory. So I interpret "profound concern" to be an indication that the Pope recognizes the so-called globalization deal to be something very different from what Dubya would have us believe.