"It's a slap in the face to that kind of thinking," said a smug Martin Brazeau, referring to creationist and ID theory.  The "slap in the face" he refers to is the revolutionary idea that ears were once used for breathing, a very natural conclusion given evolutionary presuppositions.  The evidence for this incredible belief is the skull of an extinct Panderichthys fish, purported to be 370 million years old, which Brazeau and Per Ahlberg imagine to be a missing link between fish and tetrapods (four-limbed creatures).  Since the design of the Panderichthys skull bears similarities both to other fish and to skull features present in tetrapods, these two Uppsala University scientists postulate that a passageway that probably helped the fish breathe (called a "spiracle") evolved into ears in later land-dwellers.  This is an entertaining story, but hardly the "nail in the coffin of the creationist view," as Mark W. Westneat, associate curator of zoology at Chicago's Field Museum, describes it.  Creationism is not in a coffin, because it is not dead.

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