Berkeley, CA – A team of researchers from the University disclosed today that they have discovered what they believe to be a previously undescribed branch in the evolutionary tree that may, “revolutionize how we understand science and even the origins of life itself”.
At a hastily organized news conference the project leader, Dr. Kai S. Quare, announced that his team has discovered a previously unknown extinct race of skeleton people. “They roughly resemble, and are no doubt evolutionarily related to human beings,” he explained, “and I would speculate that they lived in parallel with humans in the evolutionary past so we are naming them Homo skeletitous.”
“This is huge, I mean really huge, like Darwin maybe was wrong huge,” Quare told the assembled members of the media. “We were just looking around in an area where recent rains have caused a lot of erosion and BAM there it was sticking out of the ground,” Dr. Quare said referring to the new discovery. “
Dr. Quare described the specimen he discovered as “humanoid, certainly, but it appears to be composed entirely of calcified boney like material, devoid of tissue to readily extract DNA from,” noting that, “none of my people have ever seen anything quite like it.”
Artists concept of what Homo skeletitous may have looked like in life
“Despite the lack of soft tissues from which we could readily recover genetic material,” Dr. Quare stated assertively, “I am confident we will be able to extract usable DNA and unlock all its secrets soon enough.”
In response to questions from the media, Dr. Quare acknowledged that scientific findings normally go through a process of peer review and a period of evaluation before publication. He waived away those concerns, confidently pointing out that, “these findings are so extraordinary that I assumed there was no time to waste on the scientific method so, naturally, I just updated my Facebook status, uploaded it to my Snapchat story, and called a press conference which I am currently live tweeting.”
Dr. Quare partially credits a recent administrative reorganization at the university for inadvertently leading to the discovery. With a move to campus-wide centralization of services, his team no longer had a pool of experienced field workers at their disposal. “We reversed the paradigm by going to the field ourselves,” he proudly declared.
In a press release provided by Dr. Quare he noted that molecular and genetics students rarely have time to deal with “applied” research topics. “By the time they are fully trained they know a great deal about a single, very narrow, aspect of science so they don’t really have to know anything else about the lives or life histories of the organisms to understand them,” he explained, “So it was great fun for everyone in the group to get outside for a day!”
Leave a Comment or Whatever