ChrisBFRPKY said:
I've asked you to show me the links to the Hominid fossils because you gave me links to sites and books on evolution. I understand evolution. The links had few or no fossil display pics which actually benefits my position.
Swing and a miss, by so wide a margin I have to wonder if you think we're playing hockey instead of baseball.
When a paleontologist writes a paper on a fossil species that has been described before, there are only a few options. "Here's a photo of what we've found" IS NOT ONE OF THEM. They get rejected, categorically and without further consideration. Unless there's some extreme morphological difference (like, post-cranial bones from an organism where such had never been found before), you can't even write a monograph. Editors require interpretation alongside taxonomic descriptions. Thus, the way to find information on the number of hominid fossils is to look at the papers discussing hominid evolution.
This requires a bit of legwork on your part. I expect you to be able to read the papers, follow the references, and actually use your brain to figure out what's going on. You are apparently unwilling to do so.
Oh, and I'm not falling for this trap, either. I presented peer-reviewed publications because I know the next gambit you'll use: "That's not peer-reviewed, so it doesn't count". I've included a wide variety of publications in the hope that you'd at least bother to read more than the titles on some of them. The information is in there. It's up to you whether you want to learn it or not. I've done my part.
If you're a scientist interested in such things, surely you have had the desire to see as many Hominid fossils as you could. I mean out of state trips to museums is kinda like a vacation with the benefit of education in my view. I've done it too and that's when I realized there really isn't alot on record for Man when we look at fossil remains.
This tells me you're not a scientist of any type, and I'm gonna go ahead and say that I now believe your statements about taking ape DNA samples are lies. Any scientist would know that the overwhelming majority of specimens are kept in the back collections, not in the displays. To even insinuate that the displays provide sufficient information to estimate the number of fossils would cause professionals to lose all confidence in your credibility.
And I AM a scientist with interest in Pleistocene fossils. A professional interest, in fact--I've actually been paid to do this research. I've seen the back rooms of museums in the USA, Italy, Austria, and Romania. I've seen all kinds of fossils from the Pleistocene. Not one ape fossil, though, outside of
H. sapiens sapiens.
All Hominid fossils on record are proudly sought out and displayed because of their rarity (well, copies of them anyway).
Lie.
Most fossils--of ANY taxa--are in the collections. There are many reasons for this, ranging from "researchers are using them" to "Curators get really
intense when little kids mess with the specimens". The majority of what you see in the displays are the most photogenic remainsy. "Best" is a relative term that I'm intentionally avoiding; one of the best fossils I've ever seen was a thin sliver of decapod orbit, barely enough to know it WAS a fossil. And that's not insignificant here: most hominid remains, like those of any other vertebrate, are fragmentary. Do you expect me to believe that every hominid sesimoid bone, every hominid phalangy, every hominid vertebrae is on display somewhere?!
There are also safety reasons to keep the fossils in the back. Collections cabinets have numerous safeguards against things like humidity, fire, insects, and the like that display cases simply can't have. If a museum burns down, the collections cabinets can often survive; the displays, not so much.
This is basic curatorial stuff. Stuff your average paleontologist would learn as an undergrad (not in coursework, but every university has fossil collections and therefore someone taking care of curation, and those people teach you very quickly how to properly handle specimens).
However, a larger table would suffice.
Sure. If you include table-tops the size of mountains, the entire fossil record could fit on one! If your table was the size of the world in Minecraft, most of the biosphere could! It's fun to muck about with volume metrics. Not useful, in any way, shape, or form, but fun! And since you've admitted that your "research" consists of probably the worst method to estimate volume, while you categorically reject actually looking at the facts, it's not even fun anymore.
You are wrong. Demonstrably and irrefutably. Your methods are the worst sort of nonsense, your sample is horrendously biased in ways you haven't attempted to address, and you've got the integrity of a con man. These are not personal attacks; you may be a very nice person, I don't know. What I'm saying is that at this point, we can't trust a single thing you say about data.
If you want a useful metric for hominid fossils, find out how many collection cabinets they'd fill (there are rough standard sizes). At least that way you can estimate the cost of curation. It still won't be useful to any research, but it'll be more useful than the Creationist nonsense about tabletops.
