Slashdot Mirror
Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs
Garimelda writes "Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I recall people studying the evolution of locomotion by allowing any kind of movement- walking, tumbling, slithering, wheels, etc. Computer programs "evolve" trying random mutations and look at resulting locomotive efficiency. Some clever, unexpected solutions result which you dont see in nature. I forget the reference, but may be associated with the Sante Fe Artificial Life Institute, etc.
Oh god. I've been trying to forget those for over ten years now, and now you've brought all the horror back. In case anyone doesn't know, Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction classic that only gets better with age. The sequels made in collaboration with Gentry Lee, however, have no touch of Clarke's genius. It's suggested that Gentry Lee penned them all by himself, and his interests were peculiar indeed. The third volume of the series has some of the most ridiculous sex ever found in science fiction, a genre already infamous for bad erotic scenes. Then, in the fourth volume, Lee reveals that the mysterious aliens whose starship humans had boarded were, in fact, angels serving the Christian God. Though why an omnipotent deity works through robots and subjects races to agonizingly slow slower-than-light travel is never explained.
To me, the most interesting aspect of these early, pre-Cambrian-Explosion fossils was that bilateral symmetry (which is the norm for practically all animal life today) was nothing special. You had lots of organisms that were radially symmetric or just plain asymmetric. Whatever mass extinction event wiped out the majority of the Ediacaran biota gave a foothold to the bilaterally symmetric ancestors of modern animal life, which then dominated the Cambrian Explosion. It is just a fluke of evolution that we are not radially symmetric or asymmetric. Shades of Niven & Pournelle's Moties!