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New Zealand's First Land Mammal Discovered
Bob Beale writes to clue us to big news from New Zealand. The country has long been thought to have been devoid of land mammals until recent times. No mammal fossils had ever been found there; but now one has. From the article: "Small but remarkable fossils found in New Zealand will prompt a major rewrite of prehistory textbooks, showing for the first time that the so-called 'land of birds' was once home to mammals as well. The tiny fossilized bones — part of a jaw and hip — belonged to a unique, mouse-sized land animal unlike any other mammal known... The fact that even one land mammal had lived there, at least 16 million years ago, has put paid to the theory that New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had no competition from land mammals."
Or do genus biggus hairius footus not qualify as mammal.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I think maybe that fossil was carried over when the birds where hunting off the island
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"has put paid to the theory that New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had no competition from land mammals"
I don't really see how... one small mouse, even if there was 1 million of them, wouldn't really have made much difference to birds; it'd only be preditors that made a big difference
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I thought New Zealand only had hobbits and Peter Jackson.
The fact that even one land mammal had lived there, at least 16 million years ago, has put paid to the theory that New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had no competition from land mammals.
Why? Seems easy to conclude that birds flourished and ate the rat things to extinction.
The fact that even one land mammal had lived there, at least 16 million years ago, has put paid to the theory that New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had no competition from land mammals."
OK, that theory is total crap now.
Here's the new theory:
New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had only a little bit of competition from one tiny land mammal.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Only a small change required to the theory:
New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had little competition from land mammals.
They don't have people living in NZ? Or is that why they call themselves Kiwis? (*Cough*).
...established New Zealand as a colony for its most criminal mammals.
I suspect these are the bones of a dirty, little rat.
Please people -let's try to stay on track, and not degenerate into evolution/religion flame wars. Slashdot is about nerd news - science, computers, etc. Evolution falls into that, and should be discussed here with the concept of that it is an accepted scientific process. If you wish to dispute that, please go to another website, where evolution is not accepted.
Now on topic, those little mouse sized mammals really were the shock troops of mammalian invasion forces - they seemed to be pretty successful. I wonder how much different the climate was back then when they were around.
..........FULL STOP.
I'd suggest a minor change to the theory instead of chucking the whole thing.
www.jmagar.com
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Not likely. The article is placing this fossil around 16 mya (million years ago), while New Zealand was as isolated from all other landmasses as it is today by 60 mya at the latest. Unless that hunting bird had a range as wide as the Tasman Sea (about 2,000 km), it couldn't have gone off-shore to get mammals.
Mice also never eat any kind of insects or seeds that birds eat. In fact, mice and birds have never and will never compete for resources. Long live the mighty mouse/bird alliance!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I particularly enjoy how *one* mammal fossil would somehow constitute "competetion" for all the birds there.
Laborare Est Orare
So now we need to explain that the mouse and other mammals were either restricted by food sources or eliminated. It also has to explain why there aren't more mammals. What is it about New Zealand? Did a volcano periodically remove all life from the island so that only birds could repopulate it at some point? Perhaps the only mammals that survived a food shortage were mice which were subsequently overhunted by the birds? These are the new questions that now must be answered.
So we're still left with this question of why these 1 million mice didn't evolve or why their bird eating relatives didn't thrive on the island. I heavily endorse and suggest Guns, Germs & Steel if you haven't had the time to read it. It asks questions about subjects like these that for a long time people just used the creation theories to explain. Now we're finally starting to look for answers as to why the way things are the way they are and why some populations of humans are better off or have more 'cargo' than others.
My work here is dung.
I thought competition stimulated the process. Created more selective pressure and all. Maybe I have it all backwards though.
The fact that even one land mammal had lived there, at least 16 million years ago, has put paid to the theory that New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had no competition from land mammals.
The big question is what happened to the mammals? If mammals in New Zealand were wiped out millions of years ago, then the original "birds evolved without mammals" theory is quite valid. The only real way I see that happening is if New Zealand were completely covered by ice or some similar catastrophe that hit the whole chain and made it uninhabitable. It's possible I suppose that birds might have hunted down all the mammals, but I doubt it. Mammals tend to be pretty hardy and numerous.Seems more like the mice died off due to the large bird population killing them off.
Forget competition they were just food.
they had no competition from land mammals" only excludes competitive land mammals. What I don't understand is how competition from flying fruit and insect eating mammals is somehow different than competition from pedestrian insect and/or fruit and/or vegetation eating mammals? ..mmmm
mmmm.. fruit bat stew
That birthday prank we gave John by burrying down that old skeleton from ebay (at least now I know what animal it is) in his garden has gone way to far...
http://www.impawards.com/2002/posters/ice_age.jpg
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Could this thing possibly had claws and been predatory on the birds themselves? Food for thought - probably not much else.
I work at a major medical school in the U.S., and so the first thing I did when I read the linked article (I know, I know, GASP!) was find out what journal this was published in -- we have online subscriptions to hundreds of journals, so surely I could go to the primary source. PNAS considers this important enough that it has the article tagged as "open access" -- free for all to read.
Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific -- Worthy et al., 10.1073/pnas.0605684103 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The abstract is standard HTML, but the full article is in PDF format (link to the full article PDF).
Citation:
Worthy, T. H., A. J. Tennyson, M. Archer, A. M. Musser, S. J. Hand, C. Jones, B. J. Douglas, J. A. McNamara and R. M. Beck (2006). Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.
(no volume or page numbers as this article has not yet been published in print).
i am a soviet space shuttle
The Maoris are indigenous New Zealand Mammals.
God doesn't play easter egg hunts with fossils...
He plays pin the quantum string on the white hole...
FOSSIL!...FOSSIL!!- Lewis Black
End of Line.
but what's the point if we can't find out what it tastes like? Huh?
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
New Zealand has two species of native bats, would they count as mammals?
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
Interesting.
The fact we have native mammals (bats) in NZ hasn't really been discussed yet. How does that fit in with the observation of a mouse-sized land mammal 16 million years ago?
I find it annoyingly hard to reconcile, as we know that "Life will find a way" - and historically, land mammals have been particularly agressive in their expansion into new habitats, even going back to the sea (Ambulocetus) and taking on the birds (Bats et al).
Someone suggested volcanic activity - but this only applies to the North Island and the top of the South Island. The Taupo "eruption" og 86AD was reported by the chinese and the romans at the time. More than 30 cubic kilometres of matter was ejected in as little as 7 minutes.
However, this is dwarfed by the explosion 20,000 years ago, where over 2,000 cubic kilometres were ejected, as the magma chamber below Lake Taupo collapsed. The ferocity of this event is simply too large to imagine, and the landscape of the North Island was almost totally covered in ignumbrite, a gassy, fast flowing lava, expanding our from the crater at close to the speed of sound, in a wall some 200-300 metres tall...
The resulting Rhyolite domes from previosu explosions were actually topped by the outflow.
However, even as close as 5 kilomtres from the vent, some plant and animal life survived, and as the trillions of litres of water held loosely by the ignumbrite ran swiftly back to the lake area, and the remains of the North Island forests burned in one of the greatest fires in pre-history, and the rock cracked and cooled under muddy rain, the animals, birds, and plants made their way back into the landscape.
So - no - Taupo couldn't wipe out the land mammals of New Zealand, and the South of the South Island is almost entirely devoid of volcanos: Dunedin and Lyttleton volcanos were small, and not very violent in terms of the entire island.
There is an alternative available. The "Pukeko" is a common bird in New Zealand, and they are very poor flyers - certainly not capable of flying from Australia, where they evolved (They are the Australian "Swamp Hen") and yet they florish in New Zealand. They have only been here for a few thousand years. The best theory is that they came across on flotsam ejected from rivers during large storm events in Australia.
If Pukeko cxan arrive that way, then small mammals might also survive to arrive in New Zealand, but the number who arrived might not have been sufficient to maintain a good breeding pool, so the species might go extinct due to the lack of genetic diversity.
This would explain the discovery, the lack of other land mammals and the lack of fossils: if there were bugger all who ever floated over, then we are spectacularly lucky to even have found these ones.
That's my story anyway.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Maybe?
Maybe it was a fossil of a flying mammal? :)
Then their history books would be still ok.
Captain, I have lost my bearings (Anon. password)
As long as we are ignoring that TFA refers to LAND MAMMALS.
Bats=AIR MAMMALS
KIWI= LAND BIRDS
The Haast Eagle (the largest eagle that ever lived, the largest bird capable of flight and the largest an animal could physically get and still lift itself on wings) might well have had a range of 2,000 Km. If reports of giant eagles of similar size in other countries are to be believed, then it must have had the range as they certainly never evolved anywhere else.
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 just saw on MSNBC that flying mammals may have been around 130 million years ago.
While the early specimen found is thought to have only been capable of gliding flight (think flying squirrels of today), that's about 80 million years before there's a fossil record of actual flapping bats, apparently. So maybe in New Zealand there's a partial fossil of a proto-bat that is an ancestor to the true bats. Maybe not.
Unqualified assertions that a single curious fossil find prove anything are pretty silly. The idea of the find is fun, exciting, and certainly worth a deeper look. To claim it alone validates or invalidates anything is a bit of stretch.
You should never mention Australia's penal colony heritage when in the presence of Australians.
;-)
They are very self-conscious about it.
Whatever sense of humor they may possess quickly vanishes should somebody be tactless enough to forget that rule and try to talk about white Australia's history.
Oh yeah, and don't mention the Aborigines either...
They spend most of their time feeding on the ground.
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
More likely a bird of prey was swept over the Tasman Sea to New Zealand. My understanding is that some birds (Rosella's?) in New Zealand are thought to be immigrants from Australia swept over in storms.
You insensitive clod! I am an NZ land-based fossil!
So then essentially all of New Zealand's citizens are .... two-legged reptiles ?
Seriously, how difficult would it have been to give a title like .. "New Zealand's First Land Mammal Fossils Discovered" ?
Creationists could use this argument to refute that mice evolved from reptiles... if they accepted fossil dating explanations.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Bats do not live in the sea so I classify them an land mammals. They sleep, and give birth on land. I guess it is in all the way you classify things.
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(...) it couldn't have gone off-shore to get mammals.
You're presupposing that the bird would have to fly there.
What if the mammal rode an iceberg?
Take-away?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
This is exciting news, hopefully more material will be found in due course and we will get a better picture of what lived on land in New Zealand in earlier times. But it is a pity that New Zealand science cannot be properly funded in New Zealand, and New Zealand scientists must move off shore to make a living and even contribute to the knowledge of this country.
It was a Hobbit! Geesh. (Slashdotters know where the Lord of the Rings was filmed.)
In science - we develop a theory, and then look for negating evidence.
When we find it we revise the theory.
Its the same from chemistry to astro-physics.
Hmmm. You seem to know what you're talking about.
But I'm assuming there are migration paths which end up at Australia. There are a whole lot of islands to stop at along the way. Could a large bird carry mammal bones in its gut for the duration of the migration?
Anyways, they say the fossils are unlike any others. So that does support the idea that it lived in Australia and evolved there.
Sheep aren't from New Zealand?
Anyways, they say the fossils are unlike any others. So that does support the idea that it lived in Australia and evolved there.
The only thing that would support that idea would be if the fossils were VERY like fossils found in Australia.
So is a PNAS editor a bit like a fluffer?
1. it is known that birds (for example, crows) do use tools [no recorded cases of birds making baskets to transport mammals 1000s of miles though] 2. examination of the trout in the lakes in the Sierras (in California) support the notion that the trout get from lake to lake via birds 3. animals have been known to travel vast distances (to Hawaii and other islands) over open water, the current guess is this is done via logs and other things that float