Showing posts with label millions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label millions. Show all posts

Fossil is an Ancestor of Man

We know that we are related to sea creatures. Finding which ones are close ancestors is the problem. Dr Garcia-Bellido holds that odd-looking fossils of Nesonektris had cartilage which has the same structure as the "tails" of human embryos.

Muscles latch on to notochord cartilage. Findings have been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology by universities of Adelaide and South Australia with the South Australian Museum. The University of New England also took part in the research.

The source of the 500 million year old fossil is Kangaroo Island. This region has some of the world's richest fossil beds. vetulicolians lived in the Cambrian period and were filter feeders. Their cartilaged-tails were used for propulsion. This type of connections with humans had been overlooked in the past.
Evolution by Ty Buchanan
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Millions of years ago kangaroos were much different than they are today. The sthenurine kangaroo once dominated Australia. It became extinct only 30,000 years ago when the maga fauna era ended. They were two meters tall, much too large to hop. It is surmised that they walked like humans.

Their face was flat and they looked like a rabbit with a large tail. They were a side branch of the kangaroo family. The main line continued to become modern kangaroos. Procoptodon golliah grew to three meters tall and weighed about 240kg.

Scientists had assumed that they hopped like modern kangaroos. The most obvious conclusion is usually the best, but in this case it was wrong. Their bone structure points to them walking. Having a large tail was a bonus: it improved balance.

The mega fauna period has been painted as a time of happy giants. For humans it would have been frightening. These oversized creatures would have been difficult to hunt. Indeed, humans probably had a policy of keeping their distance. Just because most did not eat meat does not mean they weren't dangerous.
 Funny Animal Pictures by Ty Buchanan 
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New Classification System for Bird Species

Birds are the most diverse creatures on Earth.  Not only have they changed into different species on large continents, they have also adapted specifically to environments on islands.

A new classification system is in the form of a circle with increasing diversity as one moves out in time from the center.  different types of birds are correctly located on the figure covering a period of 50 million years.

There is not one specific ancestor.  "Base" species take the form  of a circle of time moving out from the center and new kinds of birds branch off directly to the outer edge.  Fast evolving birds are in red; slower ones are drawn in blue.

Significantly birds such as woodpeckers often split into new species, while hornbills, for example, did not.  There was more diversification in the Western Hemisphere.  Furthermore, species did not proliferate in the tropics because the climate remained stable there over a long period.
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Biology
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