Sunday, February 22, 2009

All Our Fossil Are Belong To Us

This fake motivational poster has apparently been around for quite a while, but was starting to disappear for reasons Ron Britton of Bay Of Fundie couldn't understand. He designed a new version, with the help of a site called MotiFake, and that one disappeared. Now he has asked folks to propagate it around the Internet to make sure it doesn't disappear again.

So here it is:



The fossil in the picture is a Tiktaalik. Tiktaalik is a transitional genus that is part way between being a fish and an amphibian. As the caption Ron put up with the MotiFake poster explained:

This is Tiktaalik. He is an example of a true Transitional Fossil. He has both fishy and lizardy parts. I really don’t know what more fundies want.

What rational people want is for schools to teach evolution and other aspects of scientific knowledge that various religious groups and other groups feel are offensive simply because it contradicts their beliefs. We don't want our copyrighted posters disappearing, either.

So Tiktaalik is now safely stored on my computer, where he can erupt onto the Internet any time he's needed.

If you want a more complete explanation of what Tiktaalik means to evolution, check out Dana Hunter's Sunday Science article.

UPDATE: Gen has a Spanish language version:


Muy caliente!

UPDATE 2: Believe it or not, there's a Tiktaalik Song, and music video.





6 comments:

Dana Hunter said...

Hee. I loves it!

"So Tiktaalik is now safely stored on my computer, where he can erupt onto the Internet any time he's needed."

I've got the Jaws theme running through my head...

In other news, captchas are getting bizarre. Pitanest? WTF? Since when did pitas begin nesting?

newtonusr said...

I got the celeocanth (living fossils), too, if that disappears :-)

nice of you to bring this up

Cujo359 said...

I was thinking more along the lines of Batman, Dana. ;-)

Thanks, newtonusr. We probably need to set up caches of all this stuff. Looks like the religious nuts have gotten it into their heads that they should complain about anything that offends their religious sensibilities to the people who run these sites. Having the things on our own computers at least means they won't be lost.

Dana Hunter said...

Tiktaalik. Fish. Attack. For some reason, I wasn't thinking Batman. But now that you mention it....

tberry6433 said...

Too cool. But before it was revealed as beeing both fishy and lizardy was I the only one who thought it also looked a bit moccasiny too? So part fish, part lizard, part footware? Or maybe that is just simple protective camo. :-)

Cujo359 said...

It looks to me like one of those things people used to put in shoes to keep them the right shape.

I'm thinking that unless there were animals around that looked like wingtips or oxfords then their appearance wouldn't have been all that useful as camouflage.