MISSING LINK

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 March 1932, Page 4

MISSING LINK

THE OSTRACODERM. Has the Missing Link been found' According to Professor William Pat ten it is a tiny flsh-like creature known as an “ostracoderm.” It is supposed to have been descended from sea scorpions and he gives its age, a trifle vaguely, as something between 500 and 1,000 million years. It possesses the “foundations of the human face.” Professor Patten, of Dartmouth College, has told the American Association for ihe Advancement of Science all about it, reports Reuter from New Orleans. He has been looking for the “link” for forty years. Found in rocks of the Baltic Sea, the "link” is a skeleton no more than five inches long—yet a. bridge between man’s evolutionary “family” (the vertebrate animals), and the other three-fourths of the -world’s living creatures, including the insects, which were formerly thought to be beyond the paltb of kinship. The ostracoderm has six pairs of jills- Pro-natal human beings also

have not only gills but tails and other resemblances to animals. These animal “vestiges” change rapidly in the developing human being into various normal organs. Evolutionists contend that the vestiges represent man’s whole evolutionary past, compressed into a few months. According to Professor Patten, the two upper pairs of ostracoderm gills have developed into some of the upper head bones. The third, fourth and fifth pairs have become the upper and lower jaws. The sixth pair has turned into a chin.