| | While from external appearence the cartoons of decades past and the sketches of today look the same, Peter, the importance lies in the details of the jaw, skull, limb and wrist bones. Fishes don't really have skulls, they have external head armor with free-floating jaws derived from gill arches and a small braincase that lies free-floating within the head. The land vertebrates, tetrapods, reduce the dermal skin bones and fuse these bones with the jaws and braincase to form what we call a skull. Our cheekbones are the remnants of the dermal armor of fishes. Our braincase is now enlarged and externally as the back and crown of the skull and our jaws are fused to the bottom of the skull, and reduced in modern mammals to only one lower jaw bone, while fish jaws had more than five bones.
These details take years of study to become obvious. Saying that they look alike is like saying that the Queens Golden Coronation Coach looks like a Model T which looks like a VW Bug. Car buffs and mechanics will know the difference even though to the eyes of the uninitiated they are all boxes on wheels.
Long held beliefs, such as the idea that the first fish to develop limbs must have had five fingers because that is the same number found in primitive mammals and turtles and lizards. But seven and eight-toed fossils have been found that threw that theory out of the window.
The creationists tend to ignore the details and their implications. Laymen may not have the time or inclination to follow fossil discoveries, but they are fascinating indeed. One of the earliest known flying dinosaurs, Microraptor gui had wings on both its arms and legs. The implication is that these animals were bi-planes and evolved from arborial gliders - disproving a long held theory that birds evolved from ground-running leapers.
In any case, it is not the iconic image of the perceptual level that matters, but the details visible to experts who learn the vocabulary of the bones.
Ted Keer
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