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Re: Limb Evolution - "Old" genes

On 5/25/07, Richard W. Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu> wrote: 


On Thu, 24 May 2007, John Conway wrote:

> Colin McHenry wrote:
>> Has anyone got a definition of Living Fossil that they think works?
>
> How about a kronophylognetic definition:
>
> "Any species that is more closely related to a fossil organism more than 30
> million years old than it is to any other living species."
>
> Howzat? Completely arbitrary but it seems to work if you ignore the species
> problem.

30 million years? Would it not suffice to say "related to an extinct
organism"? Course, that would cover, say dodos...


A possibility would be "an organism only known from fossils"; would
exclude dodos, Steller's sea cow, and anything else known from
observations of the live animal.

--
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?