The Darwin Papers Fraud

I stumbled across a very intersting web page today called "The Darwin Papers". It was about the supposed fraud of Kathleen Hunt in her Transitional Vertebrates FAQ. I was going to quote the author, but when I left clicked, an alert popped up that said "Jesus Loves You". Very Bizarre. Anyway, toward the end of his essay he states that Dr. Hunt listed "Purgatorius" as a transitional fossil, even going so far as to describe them as "pointy-faced, small early mammals with mostly primitive teeth, and claws instead of nails. But they show the first signs of primate-like teeth; lost an incisor and a premolar, and had relatively blunt-cusped, squarish molars. " The Darwin Paper Author goes on to state how ridiculous he thinks this is, as Purgatorius, according to him, is based on only two teeth. I decided to check up on this claim. If you look at the primate fossils of her FAQ, you will see that she lists "Palaechthon, Purgatorius," before her description. Now as far as I have searched, Purgatorius is known mainly by its teeth, save one specimen that included a jawbone. But what about Palaechthon? Well, that's a different story. There's a fairly complete skull that was found (click here to see a Nature entry on it). Here is a website that contains information on several Palaechthons, and three different Purgatorius fossils.

Describing a fossil transition from a skeleton, skull, jawbones, and dozens of teeth (these being from many individuals) is a far cry from creating an in depth description based on two teeth. It may not seem like much, but the evidence of transition was made only from what we have, the dentation. Personally, I was much more impressed with the partial skeleton of Cantius Trigonodus, a so called "primitive lemur" as a transitional fossil.