After six years of collaboration between over twenty scientists from research institutions across the country, researchers have completed the most comprehensive picture of mammalian ancestry to date. Using a combination of physical and genetic data, the researchers reconstructed the family tree of placental mammals--a group that now comprises over 5,100 species--and traced its many branches back to a common ancestor.
The tree's huge wealth of anatomical data allowed the researchers to reconstruct what that common ancestor probably looked like:
It was mouse-size and grey-brown, with a furry tail. It ate insects. It gave live birth to naked, squirmy babies, and its descendants diversified to fill all the ecological vacancies left by the recently-departed dinosaurs. There were a lot of vacancies, and within just a few hundred thousand years--a blink of the evolutionary eye--the mammalian lineage branched into a wide array of creatures that, in time, would become the ancestors to every placental mammal--from whales to horses to bats to humans--living today.
Click here to see a larger version of the Tree of Life.

Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.


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The picture shows two critters. Which one? We all know people that could fit either.
I can prove that evolution as a theory is wrong and needs to be updated to better reflect what Science has found.
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Darwin said if the fossil record didn't support evolution , with billions of transitional fossils, than he theory is false.
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Fossils found are either distinct extinct things or the same as living things today unchanged. that is where the term "living fossils" comes from.
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Here is Proof there was no evolution.
ww.fossil-museum.com/fossils/
(about 700 examples.)
ww.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ0RkxHD3v8&list=PLE96C947C627FE985
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The Proof is so stark, for example the May fly, of all the things that could or should have evolved, its life cycle is very very short.
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Just cause someone got stuck on a false theory doesn't mean we should be stuck there. Science has in the past and will again have to throw out a theory for a better one.
Evolution is the best theory so far to explain the evidence. If another theory can explain it better, then eventually it will replace it. But there aren't any better theories.
@evolution Is Hoax:
Evolutiuon is an OBSERVED FACT. We have seen change in species over time via documenting the change.
The Theory of Evolution is our best attempt at explaining it.
Just like Gravity is observed, and the Theory of Gravity is our best attempt at explaining how it works.
Crocodiles make an excellent counterpoint to your argument. They ahve changed very little over time because of how well suited they've been to their environment, so no genetic variation has been favorable enough to cause redical change despite the long time spans involved. BUT, they are not unchanged. They are just very similar. There are different shapes to their heads and bone structure, different teeth configurations, etc.
Crocodiles like our modern ones didn't exist back then, and cordiles as they existed millions of years ago do not live now.
Another counter example: Dogs. All the main european & american domesticated lines of dogs were bred from a single species of european wolf. Asian dogs came from a different line I believe (but am not certain on.)
With in a VERY short period of time, we have radically changed them through breeding alone. And breeding is the driving factor of evolution. We have changed what the normal variables are that create "survive and reproduce", so it might not be 'natural' selection, but we induced no mutations, only used the variation we found. The fact that we are intelligent guiders of evolution has simply sped up the process and produced variants that would not normally exist under survivalist situations. Only now, the most Fit is defined as being the most pleasing to humans.
If you want scientists to back your creationist or ID myths, you have to back your ideas with grounded, provable evidence. And we have yet to prove that any sort of creator or designer exists, nor is there even a single HINT of physical evidence, only the words of a 15-1700 year old book that was written centuries after the main character death.
And that was written millenia after another book involving the same deity (the Torah/Old Testemant), and they ripped off most of their old stories from the Babylonians.
@AdamB How dogmatic of you. Name one observed instance of a species evolving. The theory of evolution may be the best the secular world can come up with, but that hardly validates it.
While fossil evidence does suggest that different species of crocodiles have died off over the years, surely you are not suggesting that a species alive today was not alive yesterday merely because we have not found it in the record?
Technically dogs are a horrible argument. Breeding involves removing and/or segregating traits not creating brand-spank'n new ones, it is quite the opposite of evolution.
Both evolution and creation require a great deal of faith and present their own evidence. The difference is that evolution is falsifiable. There are plenty of animals that stand contradictory to the concept of individual mutations taking place over millennium. Even if you accept the idea of punctuated equilibrium, you would have a hard time explaining how the giraffe evolved.
You argue there is no physical evidence of God, yet physical evidence is not required. Black holes and atoms may not be observed directly, but we can argue logically that they exist. God is perhaps more paradoxical, but is nonetheless logical. Regardless, physical evidence for the life of Jesus does exist in the Shroud of Turin and the Shroud of Oviedo, and the Miracle of Lanciano.