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Evolution of Mammals Re-evaluated

AaxelB writes "A study described in the New York Times rethinks mammalian evolution. Specifically, that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had relatively little impact on mammals and that the steps in mammals' evolution happened well before and long after the dinosaurs' death."

19 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. What About the Other Dinosaurs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Most paleontologists now think that birds descended from dinosaurs. So in a sense, even dinosaurs in one form escaped the calamity.
    Don't forget varanus komodoensis ... and Strom Thurman, he died out only four years ago and was the most prominent organism to escape the icy grasp of natural selection!
    1. Re:What About the Other Dinosaurs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      "...Dinosaurs were created on day 6 of the creation week approximately 6,000 years ago, along with other land animals, and therefore co-existed with humans."

      "...Dinosaurs lived in harmony with other animals, (probably including in the Garden of Eden) eating only plants;" and "pairs of each dinosaur kind were taken onto Noah's Ark during the Great Flood and were preserved from drowning."

      "Dinosaur bones originated during the mass killing of the Flood;" and "some descendants of those dinosaurs taken aboard the Ark still roam the earth today."

      And you can look that up!

    2. Re:What About the Other Dinosaurs? by Monokeros · · Score: 4, Funny

      Easy. Elephants, hippos, alligators, lions, polar bears, and kitty cats were the food for the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs made their way through the dragons, unicorns, hobbits and fairies by the time the flood ended and the rest were spared. They're living on a ranch in Montana now.

      --
      The Statue of Liberty is America's lawn jockey.
    3. Re:What About the Other Dinosaurs? by Tatarize · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My question is what color was the sky prior to Noah's flood?

      Oddly enough, in the story, after God drowns everything for being completely evil. Man, woman, child, infant, fetus... all dead. God feels really really bad about it. Apparently he didn't think it through or know what was going to happen so in Genesis 9:9-13 he makes rainbows exist as a way to say, "I'm really sorry and will never do it again." -- However, rainbows are produced by a fairly trivial byproduct of the diffusion of white light through a medium. This is roughly why we have a blue sky. The light from the sun is diffused and the blue light is diffused more than the other colors. However, if this diffusion didn't exist before God screwed up by drowning everybody and everything (seems like a better solution than later sacrificing Himself to Himself to pay Himself for the debt mankind owes to Him and worse than just not keeping a grudge against people who didn't do anything wrong but somehow get the blame for some other mythological couple doing something wrong without the facilities to tell right from wrong), what color was the sky?

      --

      It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
    4. Re:What About the Other Dinosaurs? by Peter+La+Casse · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just how did these baby polar bears, kola bears, blind cave fish and blind mole rats make the oceanic journey and arrive in the Middle East.

      Magic.

      Oh, you don't believe in magic? Then you don't need any more reason to disbelieve that a magical being caused a worldwide flood, but you'll need harder questions than those to convince people who do believe in magic that it doesn't really exist.

  2. Alternate theory by Average_Joe_Sixpack · · Score: 5, Funny
    1. Re:Alternate theory by franksands · · Score: 5, Funny

      Sorry for the comment abuse, but I just had to post this comment from youtube:

      evilc27 (2 hours ago)
      The fact that we are born babies and evolve into people is evidence enough to dispel the myth of evolution. If we were born monkeys, then there would be billions of monkeys in the world as there are billions of people. This does not equate. People have called me stupid for expressing my facts, but I am far from stupid. I took an IQ test at my church school, and I scored 95. You cannot get more than 100% and so I am in the top 5% of the smartest people in the world. chew on that disbelievers.

      This just made my day.

  3. Re:From a friend by Tackhead · · Score: 3, Funny
    > a similar analysis for birds, published recently in the journal Biology Letters, revealed that more than 40 avian lineages survived the mass extinctions. Most paleontologists now think that birds descended from dinosaurs. So in a sense, even dinosaurs in one form escaped the calamity.

    In other words, chicken tastes like dinosaur!

    (In Creationist America and Lysenkoist Russia, dinosaurs taste like chicken!)

  4. Re:From a friend by Cro+Magnon · · Score: 4, Funny

    So in a sense, even dinosaurs in one form escaped the calamity. I found it pretty cool.


    It's not so "cool" having to clean dinosaur droppings off my car, though.
    --
    Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
  5. Hrmm... by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    But can they shoehorn it into the framework of a 6000 year old Earth?

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  6. Re:Evolution? I thought Jebus created the dinosaur by rucs_hack · · Score: 3, Informative

    I thought it was about six million years, could be wrong though.

    The big thing was grass, it hadn't been around for most of the time the dinosours had existed. The domination of grasses after the CT event really helped the spread of species

  7. Re:Surprise, but not a showstopper by Oligonicella · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Evolution is a theory of science, not a parlor talk theory. There is no faith in evolution, only vast reams of empirical data supporting it.

  8. Re:This is Great by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Until the next "re-thinking." Will we ever have hard evidence, or just thought experiments? But we do have hard evidence - indeed it was hard evidence that helped lead to this rethinking. Recently there have been a number of finds of surprisingly large mammals that are much older than had previously been expected. They include a beaver like (pre)-mammal from the Jurassic that was almost half a metre long, discovered in 2004, and two species large carnivorous mammal from the cretaceous (dated to about 130 million years ago - or 65 million years prior to the dinosaur extenction) which were discovered in 2000 and 2005. Such large mammals (relatively speaking) during the time of the dinosaurs draws into question the previous belief that mammals were restricted to small rat/mouse like scavengers at that time. Instead we see evidence of large, active, meat eating mammals. This implies that mammals were rather less marginalised during the dinosaurs "reign" than previously thought, and imples that mammal evolutionary history needs to be rethought accordingly.
  9. Many mammalian lineages predate the K-T extinction by saforrest · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you read The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, you'll find that recent genetic evidence suggests that many of the distinct branches of modern mammals predate the K-T extinction.

    In particular, by the time of the K-T extinction, I believe that the primate lineage had already separated from rodents, as well as the laurasiatheres (all hoofed mammals, lions, tigers, bears, etc.), xenarthrans (armadillos, sloths, etc.), and afrotheres (elephants, manatees, anteaters, etc.).

    So, while most mammals in the Cretaceous may still have been tiny shrew-like creatures scurrying around in the underbrush, many of the modern lineages had already come into separate existence.

    It is also interesting to read, in the book, that our nearest non-primate relatives aside from the tree shrews are rodents. I can sort of see it: give a mouse a little more finger dexterity and it wouldn't not that different from a lemur. It also might explain why rodents are such good laboratory specimens.

  10. Re:Science rethinking. by flitty · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Science is often championed as being very sure... especially evolution,
    I'm calling you on this rediculous statement. Science is only as sure as they can prove. You'll hardly find a scientist who, under new evidence or studies, will say "nope, the way we used to believe is more correct, and i'll be damned if i take your new evidence into consideration!"
    Sounds more like religion to me.
    --
    Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
  11. Trolly trolly troll troll. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Re-Thinking? Well, hell if you knew it wasn't right, why didn't you say so before?

    Jeez.

    See, this is why Creationism is right...No rethinking required. Ever.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  12. LIAR by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Conservapedia is self-parody, but it is produced and maintained by "Conservatives" as a repository of official "Conservative" dogma. Because they think Wikipedia is "liberal", as they clearly state in their About page. Typically Conservative, they're using the Wikipedia software for free, but don't even mutter a minimal thanks to Wikipedia - they just bash it.

    Anonymous Conservative Coward is a typical Conservative: trying to have it both ways, all ways, whenever it's convenient. There is no "truth" for today's "Conservatives" (What are they "conserving"? They're wasters, reckless consumers and rampant destroyers.) So whenever they dart out from behind their favorite weasel words to make a clear statement, they're usually a joke, at least because they contradict whatever other statement they made before that was once convenient then.

    "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  13. Re:Shamelessly off-topic, but must be done... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is obviously no evidence that the mutations which gave rise to speciations were "random" and not in some way directed, naturally or supernaturally, or otherwise forced in some particular direction.

    "Obvious" if you ignore pretty much all work in molecular genetics at least since Watson and Crick.

    Once we arrive at a better understanding of how DNA works, perhaps it will be possible to form mathematical models to determine whether or not the "random mutation" theory is feasible.

    You mean, the way bioinformaticists and statistical geneticists do all the time, right now, and have been for years?

    Maybe it's only feasible during intermittant radiation events that decimate populations by causing widespread mutations, leaving a few individuals with improvements, who go on to reproduce and build up populations again. Maybe it's not possible at all.

    Do you have any data, at all, that would support either one of these hypotheses? Or are you just cut'n'pasting from some ID site somewhere?

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    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  14. Re:Surprise, but not a showstopper by testpoint · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have recently examined the Marzeah Papyrus (7th century B.C.), fragments of the dead sea scrolls, septuagint leviticus , septuagint exodus and Gospel of John fragments all from the 3rd century A.D. Modern, nonparaphrased, versions of the Bible, corresponding to these fragments are accurately translated.

    Many of the original writers and earliest translators could write and speak multiple languages. While you might consider them superstitious they weren't illiterate. William Tyndale, a 16th century scholar and translator was fluent in eight languages. His work influenced Shakespear and the King James version of the Bible.

    Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake because a version of the Bible that could be read by all, transferred power from the King and the Pope to the church, which Tyndale translated as congregation or congress (people) rather than church (hierarchy). Many credit Tyndale and his translation for furthering the concepts of representative democracy, individual responsibility, and equality.