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Land Bridge Migration
CowboyRobot writes "One 'advantage' of global warming is the increasing availability of fossil records fom the frozen north.
For example, new evidence shows that many of the most common mammals in North America walked across the Bering land Bridge from Asia thousans of years ago. Reuters and Discovery Channel have other versions. (sorry, no pics)"
Increasing heat directly translates to increasing bikinis.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
Hasn't the theory of mammals migrating to North America via a land bridge been around for a long time?
It's always seemed pretty logical to me. Good to see that the theory has finally been proven.
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It would be interesting to see how beaver lodge building has evolved over the last 5 million years, if at all.
I think this could give us an unusal look into the evolution of complex behaviour.
The carnivors arrived on north america they followed the herbivores, but what led them to the other side? Perhaps it was overcrowding on the Siberia side or perhaps the plant food was better and they folowed it. That would be a good botanical study, That perhaps the greening of the Bering Strait was from the west to the east and it had a better quality.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
Didn't we learn about this in elementary school?
I know scientists have followed human migratory habits over the land bridge, primarily using artifacts like arrow heads or old campsites to track it, but animal migration I've never heard much of before. Very facinating to read.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
If you went to school at the Imaginary School of Imaginary Learning of Things That Are Imaginary.
how can you have a land bridge? i mean it's either land or a bridge. it's kinda like jumbo shrimp. or OSS windows. or wise guy.
a
b
testing out my trending skills
So, animals are not indiginous to the americas. I say we remove them all, restoring the land to it's natural state.
In fact, at some point, there were no plants either. I think we should just nuke the whole planet, restoring the natural enviornment.
We'll leave behind a note for any future life that emerges, asking them to do the same if they ever infect the earth.
These animals were *clearly* migrating from Noah's Ark to present-day North America. Why, exactly two (and only two) of each species managed to trek millions of kilometers across land, avoiding all predators, and managed to find the food required. For example, the koala bear somehow managed to find an ample supply of eucalyptus leaves (its sole source of food) from here to Australia.
This has been a Mythology 101 lesson. Now back to reality.
So, animals are not indiginous to the americas. I say we remove them all, restoring the land to it's natural state.
Your cynicism is misplaced and betrays a lack of understanding. The motivation behind restoring ecosystems to their "natural state" is not to make them conform to some silly romantic ideals, it is a simple, practical motivation: when foreign species invade, the consequences are often diseases, pests, reduced productivity, and erosion. Restoring the ecosystem to its "natural" state, a state that may have existed stably for millions of years is simply prudent, practical resource management.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In the origin story from the book of Genesis, God confused the languages of the people because they stayed too close to Babylon after the flood, disregarding God's order to fill the earth. I'm guessing that the animal migrations may have piggybacked on the spreading of the peoples that started after they abandoned building the Babel monument. Young-earth creationists don't seem to have much against the concept of small-scale adaptation over generations, which could help explain how koalas picked up a taste for eucalyptus leaves.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, the courage to say it as an Anonymous Coward
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.