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Fossil Rises From its Grave
gokulpod writes "Scientific American reports that a family of animals known as Diatomyidae thought to have been dead for 11 million years has been discovered in Laos. From the article: 'Fossilized remnants of this group have been found throughout Asia with a distinctive jaw structure and molars. It represents a rare opportunity to compare assumptions derived from the fossil record and an actual living specimen to determine overall accuracy of the techniques involved. This discovery also provides a compelling argument for preservation efforts in Southeast Asia.'"
but i would have preferred something called a "rat-squirrel" remain extinct
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let's introduce this little guy to the TRS-80, a '59 Chevy, and the reincarnated ghost of Archie Bunker!
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
You don't have to find an animal previously believed extinct. There are millions of species around. Just put together case studies of known living animals. Then have a group unfamiliar with the species of interest try to predict its characteristics from genealogical family members.
"You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means..."
Much like Bob the dinosaur, the Diatomyidae has simply been in hiding.
And also
The reports of Diatomyidae's extinction have been premature. To correct this, the Museum of Natural History has offered $1000 for every dead Diatomyidae brought to them, as this is cheaper than correcting the records of Diatomyidae's extinction. And would make the scientists right again.
Does this mean I can finally have my Ribwich again?
Knowledge of the Laotian rock rat has been around for about a decade now, but it was originally classified in a new family, prior to its connection to the 11 million year old family.
Animals which died 11 million years ago can have their remains dated to 11 million years. Some of their descendants are still alive today, which doesn't change the fact that their ancestors died a long time ago.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why is it that a species thought to be extinct for 11 million years has now just been found, but somehow we seem to think we know the exact number of panda bears and such?
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
No.
Next question?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A few of their watches are nice though.
Because our role in extinction is closer to "Asteroid Impact" than "Sorry dude, you got out-competed". Being as we drove much of the North-American ice-age macrofauna into extinction, followed by the Auroch (17th century), Dodo (ibid), Passenger Pigeon (19th), almost got the Bison, Cod, and Whales, and are now probably going to finish off our genetic cousins, the Bonobo, for lunch, it would behove us to not casually slaughter something that has survived 11 million years mostly by our absence.
We are the most effective predator ever, with the capability of destruction on a scale unachievable by all but the most extreme natural disastors. That's why we have to make a conscious effort to leave things be, and let nature take their course, rather than our current system "whoops, it doesn't do well in suburbia, guess it just deserves to go."
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
So, gokulpod, while it's a known fact that I've dirtied the room more than you could ever imagine, should I nevertheless investigate the nether regions of your old wardrobe and really find out what's inside? Now that your true inclinations are out of the closet, I foresee a few skeletons dropping out of that cupboard.
More than mere navel gazing.
Panda bears, polar bears, African elephants, all of the surviving Great Apes etc, fall into the former category. This makes the territory easy to explore. It also means that the region will likely be heavily surveyed by both corporations and environmentalists, each trying to win concessions to their perspective.
(Having said that, even well-studied populations aren't necessarily as well-understood as thought. At least one species of dolphin off the coast of New Zealand has turned out to really be two distinct species - drastically reducing the population of the first group. A group of Right Whales off the coast of Australia has also been demonstrated to really be multiple, genetically distinct species.)
Extremely remote locations aren't as well-studied. It's much harder to send undergraduates to remote islands around Papau New Guinea. No beer. Very remote locations are extremely difficult and expensive to study, so they generally aren't. This is where the bulk of "new species" and "rediscovered species" are found. These locations are generally under much less pressure, which means that amateur and semi-professional researchers are unlikely to take the time and effort to go - they're generally needed much more elsewhere.
Then, you've the problem of extremely small animals. The rediscovered woodpecker in North America is not the biggest bird on Earth, is highly mobile (duh!), blends in well with the environment, and is very probably terrified of people - the only people who go into that particular woodland being hunters. This rat-squirrel is likely smaller still, probably bleds in a lot better, and has had 11 million years of practice at running away.
Finally, numbers are very important. If you mis-count by 10 out of 1000 elephants, the number is basically still the same. If you mis-count by 10 the number of Yahtzee River dolphins (of which there are somewhere between 0 and 33 left), it is somewhat more significant. The scientists have not seen any of these rat-squirrels alive and only the one that was caught. As far as anyone is concerned, that may have been the last one alive - at present, we have no evidence to the contrary. If populations have been extremely low and highly localized, which is likely the case, then it was sheer chance that it was ever seen at all. See the story behind the discovery of the Wollemi Pine for other such discoveries.
(Numbers are absolutely critical when it comes to observing small species. It's easier to see one rhino from a mile off than ten dormice from a hundred feet, or a hundred fairy shrimp from five paces. As such, you need comparitively VAST numbers before you are likely to ever see anything at all.)
I don't completely trust the population counts (see my comments about genetically distinct species) but the observations I've seen would imply the counts may be far too high in some cases, NOT the other way round. There will unquestionably be more "living fossils" discovered over time, but the numbers will remain insignficant compared to the number of species that have genuinely been driven extinct - by "natural causes" or by human activity. This find ADDS to the urgency of efforts to save what there is, not the other way round.
(For a start, if its nearest cousin died off 11 million years ago, the population is likely genetically very similar, leaving it vulnerable to disease and genetic disorders. There is also no possibility of bolstering numbers through cross-breeding efforts - a rescue tactic used by some conservationists when "pure" populations are simply not possible any longer, as there's nothing left on Earth that will be even remotely close enough.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
More to the point, why have crocodiles not changed much in 100 million years?
Perhaps it has something to do with the way creatures live. An organism which lives on the edge, so to speak, like a cheatah or a falcon, will experience selective pressure because there are so many ways for an individual in that species to fail at what they do.
Crocs just float into the water until their prey happens to come along: doesn't matter what really, then they eat it.
So maybe the answer is they they don't experience much selection pressure because of the (relatively) shit existance they live.
Another possibility is that the Crocodile lifestyle is a kind of local mininum for which they are well suited. Any change would make them less fit and their environment (creeks, estuaries, ditches) aren't going away any time soon.
I don't know about Diatomyidae, though.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There's no explanation needed. Just because a species remains relatively unchanged for millions of years does not mean that evolution doesn't happen.
It's like talking about black holes and then calling cosmology into question because our sun hasn't become one.
BTW, the linked to article is a steaming pile of dung. If the rest of that periodical is written as poorly, I suggest you stop reading it. The linked article takes quotations from the New Scientist article out of context and implies that it was an article questioning evolution. It wasn't. There are lots of valid ways to question evolution, but twisting other people's words to support your point of view isn't one of them.
I think there is a great misunderstanding about evolution at all: Evolution doesn't require livings to constantly change (and as a matter of fact it's not the single living, that changes, it's the long chain of generations which carries the change). Evolution says: If the environment changes (for what ever reason), the cards get newly shuffled, and what was a survival trait before can now be (but doesn't need to be) a disadvantage.
Evolution theory claims that the livings best adapted to the environment survive, and that offspring always has a little variation to the parent generation, caused (for livings creating offspring by sexual contact) by recombination of the genes and mutation (which works also for parthenogenetic offspring). Thus every new generation is faced with a new challenge, and only those livings that are adapted just enough to breed will have offspring, the other lines will die out when the livings which weren't able to create offspring die (for whatever reason: old age, dropping of cliffs, being devoured by other livings, getting sick without recovery...).
Living fossils are livings which didn't change very much since millions of years, and that could simply happen because each generation basically finds the same survival conditions than the generation before. Sharks and crocodils, gingkos and corals all have lived in environments where there was no big pressure on changing the building plan.
"Living fossil" is just a description for a living, which is recent, but where there exists a large fossil record of similar livings, often reaching back in time for millions of years and often spawning more morphological variation than can be found today. That's nothing "anti evolutionary" or such. It just happens. And it will probably happen again that with exploring not yet fully explored habitats (like many parts of the rain forests), we will find recent livings of which until now we have only fossil records because they died out in most of their former environments due to changes they couldn't adapt to.