MISSING LINK

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3447, 24 March 1932, Page 4 (Supplement)

MISSING LINK

SCIENTIST SAYS IT HAS BEEN FOUND. THE OSTRACODEKM. FOUNDATION OF THE HUMAN FACE. Has the missing link been found ? According to Professor William Patten, it is a tiny fish-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 500,000,000 and 1,000,000 000 years. It possesses the "foundations of the human face."

Professor Patten, of Dartmouth College, has told the American Association for the Advancement of Science all about it. 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's 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 pale of kinship. The ostracoderm has six pairs of gills. Pro-natal human beings also have npt only gills but tails and other

resemblances to animals. These animal " vestiiges " 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.