Science |
 Roboreader |
Humans And Animals
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We have a lot of things flying around in our skies today. There are planes, balloons, blimps, rockets and maybe UFOs. Many millions of years ago there were large things flying around in the skies of earth, but the difference is that they were alive. A fossil of a toothless flying Pterosaur has been found. It was one of the largest of the flying reptiles. Think of it this way, it was probably larger than your family car. Can you imagine seeing something like that heading for you? Anyone who has tangled with a Blue jay knows how fierce even a little bird can be. I think it would be fair to say that if a Pterosaur set its sights on you, you were finished. The wingspan on this thing was five and one half meters. That is about 18 feet. Its shoulder was about 40 inches off the ground. An interesting point is that the fossil was found in Brazil and is an example of Chaoyangopteridae, a group of toothless dinosaurs that had never been found outside China. Proof that an animal that can be traced back to the dinosaur age is breeding in New Zealand has just been found. What was found were four eggs that had a leathery like shell. They turned up during routine maintenance in a wild life sanctuary. To be exact it was Karon Wildlife Sanctuary, in Wellington. The manager of the preserve stated, “The nest was uncovered by accident and is the first concrete proof we have, that our tuatara are breeding. It suggests that there may be other nests in the sanctuary we don't know of." I guess by now you are wondering what a tuatara is? A tuatara is a dragon-like reptile. It can grow to a length of 32 inches and is a direct descendant of a species that walked with the dinosaurs some 225 million years ago. It may not be a giant, but it is a living dinosaur.
Neanderthal Scientists are now saying that it is not only our technology that is evolving at a rapid pace, but it is also us. They claim that the human from 2,000 years ago was different from the human today. A researcher from the University of Utah has said, “We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” What I thought was interesting is the way he said we are evolving. He stated that we are evolving away from each other. In other words, the evolution is specific to the continent you live on. This would seem to be contrary to everything we have believed. With all the world travel and mixing of the races, you would have thought that we would all be evolving in the same way. The evolution is so rapid that it is taking place over centuries, which is a blink of an eye when you consider the time scale of the human race. A key finding was that 7 percent of human genes are evolving extremely fast.
Meteor Impact On Earth A biologist now believes that he has found evidence of mass extinction in living creatures. He believes that the substance that caused the extinction can clearly be discerned as hydrogen sulfide. In high concentrations a single whiff can kill a living creature. He now believes that hundreds of millions of years ago hydrogen sulfide saturated the lands and oceans of earth. All creatures did not die however, somehow some survived and how they did this is unclear. but here is his theory. It turns out that if an animal gets a small dose of this chemical, rather than killing it, it will be put into a state of suspended animation. He believes that because of this, some animals could have hibernated through an extinction event and that could be how some of them survived. Reptiles are much harder to kill than mammals. Have you ever wondered how we know for sure that we are evolving? Here are a couple of those ways. We have an organ called Jacobson's organ. It is in our nose. Many animals have it and it is used to track others and to detect pheromones for sex. Well in humans it has long stopped being useful. We have developed past that point. There are muscles in our ears that animals also have that allow their ears to swivel around. We can no longer do this with our ears, since we have evolved past the need for it. The muscles are known as the extinsic ear muscles,. Our jaws have grown smaller and our wisdom teeth have become unnecessary and sometimes a problem for us. Humans have what is left of a third eye lid, a membrane that covers the eye then retreats. It no longer works because we don't need it anymore. It is very common in reptiles and fish. The appendix has no use in modern humans, but was probably useful in some way for early humans. There are a lot of other vestiges left over in us from earlier times. |
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