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Two-headed Reptile Fossil Found in China
[TheBORG] writes "A tiny skeleton from the Early Cretaceous shows an embryonic or newborn reptile with two heads and two necks, called axial bifurcation ('two-headedness') (a well-known developmental flaw among reptile species today such as turtles and snakes) was found in China by French and Chinese paleontologists recovered from the Yixian Formation, which is nearly 150 million years old."
Especially after seeing the photo of a sketch of some cartoon character at the story.
Evolve radiating appendages that are highly vascularized to move blood rapidly away from the hot "core" with the brain.
Doesnt't sound plausible because high blood flow at those rates exposes you to serious damage by relatively small injuries.
Axial bifurcation is nothing special. But axial trifurcation, on a dog, well that's called a Hades special... and yeah, Orthrus is totally jealous.
P.S. Also, don't mention his little brother Chimi. That dog will bite you...
I'd venture to say a brain in the chest cavity would make a hell of a lot more sense and invest in faster nerves for the ears and eyes
If it made more "sense" to have the brain in the chest, we would have brains in our chests. It's just pointless to argue with mother nature when it comes to design. You can probably point to some kinks that specific species are still working out, but anything this universal is so damn near optimal that it's awe-inspiring.
I suspect the answer here is that there's no such thing as "faster nerves"; you'd have to increase nerve cell length to cut down on the number of synapses, which would make them more fragile, and, more importantly, less manageable (and still wouldn't make up for the comparatively huge distance). Come to think of it, it's the old "higher throughput" == "lowered responsiveness" problem.
Plus, the head is better protected than the chest; it would probably add an inordinate amount of weight to the skeletal structure to fortify it to the same degree. Also, maintaining the blood-brain barrier would probably be tricky without the separation that the neck provides (not to mention that your circulatory system would be right next to the thing).
sic transit gloria mundi
When we see something like 6 fingers in a human, we think its a flaw. Why do we think that these defects are flaw not as step to human evolution?
You are right on the mark. Deciding what is a 'flaw' is a cultural decision, a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth here. Is short stature a 'flaw' in Pygmies? Perhaps the Pygmies think otherwise; perhaps we all might think otherwise if tomorrow some predator existed that attacked only tall people and virtually wiped them all out, or a food source appeared which was much easier to find for short people. Even attempts to 'prove' something is a 'flaw' biologically is doomed to fail - if Pygmies are short because they have less growth hormone, who can say what is the "normal" amount of that hormone? All we can say is that a certain amount of it is "statistically normal" in that it is commonplace, and certain other amounts are less-often seen.
Calling something a 'flaw' is a value judgment. Value judgments are opinions, points of view. Not to get all postmodern - not everything is "just a point of view" - e.g. Pygmies ARE short. The interpretation of that fact is, however, just an opinion.
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It's probably called a flaw because the development of the extra head isn't determined by the creature's genes. It's a trait that can't be passed to its offspring, so it has no part in evolution.
Maybe
As far as I can see, Two Heads are the same as having two hands. Its not a flaw, its a step in evolution.
I saw in an article about a two-headed snake that 1 of 10,000 snakes have that flaw and that they usually don't live long mainly because they got trouble eating. Please next time don't claim with so much confidence such a thing as "it's not a flaw but a step in evolution" when it couldn't be a step in evolution since two headed reptiles hardly can make it to reproduction. It's not about deciding whether it's a flaw or an evolutionary feature because it's objectively a flaw, for a reptile to have two heads leads to a premature death and doesn't in any way help surviving in the environment.
And to correct your bad six-finger analogy you might rather want to compare that to trisomy-21 or mucoviscidosis. When you see kids dying when they're 20 because of some "flaw" in their lungs do you still think it's an evolutionary step? People get modded up over some bullshit these days..
You just got troll'd!
Fake is the wrong word, and "not a novel discovery" is a huge understatement. Since we see reptiles deformed now doesn't mean they always had this genetic problem. This is a confirmation of a theory if nothing else. I think it's an amazing discovery, even if it was a predictable abnormality.