This article in Wired is yet another in a long line of examples recently of new species being "found" in the collections of museums.  I find this to be a fascinating phenomenon - it's as if museums were my dad's basement!  Anything could be in there!

Paleobiologist Matt Friedman and five other colleagues found the fossils of two huge prehistoric filter feeding fishes from the pachycormid genus.  Pachycormids were huge fish that drifted slowly through the seas, sucking down whatever prehistoric plankton and other small animals were caught by its filter feeding plates.  They filled the same ecological niche as whales and whale sharks do today.

Until Friedman's research, the pachycormids were assumed to be "a brief footnote" in the history of animal evolution.  However, Friedman turned up pachycormid fossils at several other museums.  One of the oldest examples was found "in the dusty recesses of London's Natural History Museum."  Other skeletons had been mis-classified as belonging to other animals, or simply dismissed as being uninteresting.

In the end, it turns out that the pachycormids lasted for over 100 million years, longer than any other group of animals.  Longer even than the Cenozoic age, which is when mammals rose to power.  Unfortunately, these massive creatures became extinct during the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, which was probably caused by a huge meteor striking the earth.  Because the pachycormids were so closely reliant upon creatures which photosynthesize, and because the meteor strike caused the skies to be clouded with ash thus breaking the photosynthesis cycle, they were quickly rendered extinct.

Creationists often cite the lack of transitional forms as proof that the earth is only 6,000 years old.  However, it turns out that a lot of the transitional forms do exist - we simply haven't finished cataloging them yet.  In 2008, Friedman dug deep into the stacks at the University of Chicago, and came out with a series of transitional forms for the flatfish.  This bizarre category of fish includes fish like the sole and the halibut, whose eyes have both moved to the same side of their body in order to accommodate the fish's habit of lying flat upon the ocean floor.

In the case of the flounder's transitional form, Friedman unearthed this discovery while flipping through a book on fish fossils in researching his dissertation.  He noticed that one of the fossils depicted looked a lot more like a flounder than it did a trout.  (Both fish are teleosts, but obviously they have some differences in body shape and eye placement.)  Friedman then launched a research project which took him through museums across Europe, looking for more examples of this odd fish's fossil.

What he found was a fish species where one eye was placed normally, and the other eye was placed high up on the skull.  In other words, a transitional species of flounder, something that the Creationists had long argued did not, would not, and in fact could not exist.

These transitional flatfish are excellent proof of the truism that "just because you can't imagine it, that doesn't mean it can't exist."  I wonder what Friedman will uncover next?