Metasequoia fossils7/20/2023 ![]() ![]() I join them enthusiastically in their effort to rehabilitate the living fossil concept. If you haven’t already read their essay, check it out! Also, here is the more technical, peer-reviewed version of their argument. In this context, Scott Lidgard and Alan Love’s contribution last month is extremely welcome. The fact that some people misappropriate or misunderstand a scientific concept does not seem like a good reason to jettison that concept if there are ways of putting it to productive work. Although I can understand this impulse, part of me feels like it concedes too much. Still, I wonder if some scientists might judge that it’s easier to declare ‘living fossil’ an illegitimate concept than to continue deploying it while also taking countermeasures against misunderstanding and misappropriation. ![]() Living fossils therefore offer no aid or comfort whatsoever to the creationist. We can explain stasis by invoking habitat tracking, stabilizing selection, developmental considerations, population structure, and even the differential extinction risk of ecological specialists vs. Second, where it does occur, stasis itself is just an evolutionary pattern-an explanatory challenge, to be sure, but one that evolutionary theory has the resources to meet. Of course, this is badly mistaken in two ways: First, morphological stasis with respect to some fossilized traits is still compatible with a great deal of evolutionary change going on under the geological radar. If you do a little browsing around the internet, you can find creationist sites that occasionally treat living fossils as evidence that evolution does not occur. I sometimes wonder if one of the things that makes scientists so wary of talking about living fossils is that creationists have been known to misappropriate the concept. If we were wrong about those paradigm cases like coelacanths and cycads, that might indicate that there is something irretrievably messed up about the very notion of a living fossil. In recent years, a number of important studies (like this one or this one) have raised doubts about whether paradigmatic living fossil taxa deserve to be considered living fossils at all. This well intentioned “educational” video from the PBS Eons series reflects a widely (though not universally) shared skepticism about the very idea of a living fossil. Lately, though, the notion of a living fossil has fallen on hard times. And I think that extra care might be reasonable, though explaining why is a philosophical challenge. (Lorax, step aside!) There’s a sense in which I care more about the tree because it’s a living fossil, or because of what I know about the past. I reckon I would work to protect that tree with indignation and gusto, in a way that I would never do for a run-of-the mill red maple. Suppose that a proposed expansion of the student center would require cutting down the metasequoia. Most of all though, knowing that dinosaurs likely stood under trees just like this one drastically changes our aesthetic experience of the tree. Then there is also the joy of sharing with students some knowledge about a tree that many of them walk past every day. First of all, the tree itself is beautiful and stately, and quite unlike the hemlocks and hardwoods of Connecticut. I can’t speak for any of my students, but for me it was kind of a special moment, aesthetically speaking. There, right next to a sidewalk between student center and the library, is an elegant metasequoia - a “dawn redwood.” We visited the tree to pay homage to a living fossil.Īfter having spent a couple of weeks reading and discussing papers about dinosaurs, I just had to show the students a tree that is, morphologically, barely distinguishable from trees that that flourished during the late Cretaceous and-in utter disregard of asteroids and/or cataclysmic volcanism-on into the Paleocene and Eocene. We walked out across the road, past the student center. ![]() A couple of weeks ago, I made a spontaneous decision to take the first-year students in my class on “The Meaning of Dinosaurs” on a ten-minute field trip to a special place in the Connecticut College Arboretum.
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