[Taxacom] LOL (was Re: New lizard species)

[Curtis Clark]

On 6/10/2010 3:36 PM, Richard Zander wrote:
> A taxacomer has asserted that fossils are not ancestors of anything
> alive today, maybe because they probably are in lines that died out. Is
> that the reason? Is it a good reason?
>    
I might be the one you remember. My assertion is that the probability of 
any fossil being the ancestor of an organism alive today is effectively 
zero (the product of the probability of begetting a lineage extending to 
the present and the probability of being fossilized), but the 
probability of being a *relative* of an organism alive today is 1.0.

-- 
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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