[Taxacom] fossil potato relative

[John Grehan]

Interesting add on note - creationists making hay out of potatoes

http://www.icr.org/article/evolutionary-clock-futility/

A recent fossil discovery in Patagonia places a glaring spotlight on this
embarrassing clock problem.3Extremely rare and delicate fossil remains of
tomatillos (Mexican husk tomatoes)—a member of an economically important
group of plants called nightshades that includes potatoes, peppers,
tobacco, petunias, and tomatoes—has popped up in rock strata in Argentina
alleged to be 52 million years old. For evolution, this early time period
is long before the dates previously ascribed to these species of plants by
both paleontologists and biologists. Furthermore, the fossil tomatillo
fruits look exactly like those growing today, exhibiting no evolution over
the alleged eons of time. Because evolutionary biologists have sequenced
the genes from many different types of nightshades and come up with many
ancient dates and supposed evolutionary relationships, these fossils are
particularly disturbing and only serve to highlight the futility of
evolutionary dating systems.

As noted in a previous* Acts & Facts* article, when biologists remove the
biased evolutionary time calibrations from their molecular clocks, they
almost always arrive at dates that correspond with a biblical creation
timeframe of 6,000 to 10,000 years.4 But because bias-free empirical clocks
don’t match up with the myth of Darwinian evolution, they are rejected out
of hand. The empirical scientific facts support the Bible and not the
failed opinions of man.


On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 1:52 PM, John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not making any judgement about this one, but notice comment on molecular
> clocks at the end.
>
> John Grehan
>
> http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/52millionyearold-fossil-
> relative-to-the-potato-discovered-in-patagonia/
>
> Despite becoming ubiquitous in almost every corner of the world,
> surprisingly little is known about the deep evolutionary history of the
> group of plants that gave rise to potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco. Now, researchers
> have found
> <http://phys.org/news/2017-01-south-american-fossil-tomatillos-nightshades.html>
>  just how far back these organisms go, with the discovery of a fossil
> relative that dates back to 52 million years ago, tens of millions of years
> older than previously thought.
>
> The fossil belongs to a fragile berry of a plant known as a tomatillo, or
> ground cherry. They form fruit that is often surrounded by a thin, papery
> lantern, making it difficult for them to be fossilized
> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38511034>. Members of the
> *Physalis* genus, they form a small branch of the nightshade family,
> which in turn includes many commercially important crops, from potatoes
> and petunias to chillies and aubergines.
>
> The only fossil fruits ever found from this family of almost 2,000 species
> of plants, the two specimens were discovered in a fossilized rainforest
> that once grew across Patagonia in South America. With a lack of available
> fossils for this group of plants, researchers have had to rely on molecular
> dates for when the nightshade plants first evolved, and had settled on the
> figure of around 35 to 51 million years old, while the tomatillo was
> thought to be a relative newcomer at only 10 million years old.
>
> This new discovery, however, completely changes this. The fossils, dating
> to 52 million years ago, show that the ground cherries are actually a
> relatively ancient branch of the nightshade family. “We exhaustively
> analyzed every detail of these fossils in comparison with all potential
> living relatives and there is no question that they represent the world's
> first physalis fossils and the first fossil fruits of the nightshade
> family,” says
> <http://phys.org/news/2017-01-south-american-fossil-tomatillos-nightshades.html>
>  Professor Peter Wilf, from Pennsylvania State University.
>
> The fossils underpin the need for researchers to be careful when deducing
> an organism's evolutionary age solely from molecular clocks.
>
>