Montuori, in Encyclopedia of Creativity (Second Edition), 2011 The Universe and Creativity The discovery of a missing link solely creates two further missing links-what came “before,” and what came “after.” When the “before-one,” discovered in 1996 resembled the feathered dinosaurs in China, the “after-one” that was discovered in 2018 from Slovakia was undoubtedly the first bird rather than considered as feathered theropod dinosaurs ( Kundrát et al., 2018).Ī.
The transitional fossil of Archaeopteryx was first described in 1861, considered as a missing link between reptiles and birds. When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, there was a lack of evidence of “transitional” fossils-that appeared with structural features between two major groups of organisms, recognized as “missing links” in the “ great chain of being.” Thereafter, the scientists noticed that the progress of “Life” does not follow a path of a linear chain, from “simple” form to “complex” form, rather proliferating like a branching bush with linear lineage splitting apart and exist altogether.
Subir Ranjan Kundu, in The Evolutionary Biology of Extinct and Extant Organisms, 2021 Abstract As trees are so widespread and provide such a useful tool for representing evolutionary relationships, it is critical that we know how to read them and understand what they can and cannot tell us, a skill now commonly known as ‘tree thinking’ ( O’Hara, 1992 Baum et al., 2005 Baum and Smith, 2012). And trees are even found in popular media and museum displays, where they are designed to bring evolutionary discoveries to a general audience. High school and university students also encounter phylogenetic trees in textbooks and in lectures as a means to organize knowledge of biological diversity. In the one hundred and fifty years since this passage was written, tree diagrams have come to be an indispensable tool for summarizing what is known about evolutionary history and guiding research in several fields, such as epidemiology, community ecology, and genomics. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth … the great Tree of Life … covers the earth with ever-branching and beautiful ramifications. The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. This broad-scale history of evolutionary relationships is known as ‘phylogeny.’ So, if a ladder is not an appropriate metaphor, how can we picture phylogeny? No less a scientist than Charles Darwin provided an answer: But while we cannot know their future, we can (in principle) figure out the path that each species took to its current locale. Modern day species are not at destinations, but wherever they happened to be when we humans decided to map things out. Unlike a road trip, however, evolution doesn’t stop. There is no predetermined destination, no prescribed route, and no need to stick to predictable roads. Instead, evolution is more accurately described as an exploration, a freewheeling road trip in an all-terrain vehicle, perhaps. Furthermore, a ladder is a misleading metaphor because it implies that evolution is progressive and directed toward a particular endpoint, which it is not. However, we now understand that the organisms alive today did not evolve from other living species, but from shared ancestors. This perspective held that organisms could be arranged as the rungs on a ladder, with rocks and minerals at the bottom moving up through plants and ‘simple’ animals, with humans close to the pinnacle. In antiquity, biological diversity was classified and placed on the Great Chain of Being or Ladder of Life, the Scala Naturae. Describing the relationships among organisms has been a challenge since well before the origin of evolutionary theory.
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