Followup thoughts on the meteorite fossils claim

On Saturday I posted about the claims of Richard Hoover, a NASA scientist who says he has found evidence of fossilized microbes in a meteorite. As soon as I saw the story (thanks to a tweet from my friend Sheril) I knew the 'net would explode with the news, so I wrote a quick post about it. My intent was to be as scrupulously fair as I could be while still trying to rein in the usual speculation that follows sexy news like this. I've had a day to mull all this over, and I wanted to write some more thoughts about it. My initial thought was, of course, extreme skepticism -- we've seen claims like this before which haven't panned out, and this one has a lot more, um, hyperbole than most before it -- but not being an expert in biology I didn't want to make any firm ...