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Kiwi Genetically Closer to Extinct Elephant Birds Than to the Emu
"A new study by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), has solved a 150-year-old evolutionary mystery about the origins of the giant flightless 'ratite' birds, such as the emu and ostrich, which are found across the southern continents. This group contains some of the world's largest birds - such as the extinct giant moa of New Zealand and elephant birds of Madagascar. ... [A]ncient DNA extracted from bones of two elephant birds held by the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, has revealed a close genetic connection with the kiwi, despite the striking differences in geography, morphology and ecology between the two." Which means that the emu is not, as conventional wisdom has long held, the kiwi's closest link. Here's more on the research from the University of Adelaide.
...stuff that matters?
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Had to read this twice before I realised they weren't talking about New Zealanders in general.
Ok, having read several of these stories now, I'm calling bullshit on that one study a while back that said DNA would only last a few hundred years. We've got partial DNA matches from giant elephant birds and woolly mammoths and etc. Now where the heck is my Jurassic Park?
This changes everything!
The next time some idiot says, "Without government support, we wouldn't have any science!!!" point out this shit.
As if all government "investment" is NASA-level research right? (Hey, it gave us billion dollar tang ;-).
Does anyone actually think Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) sounds like a good way to allocate our scarce resources? And are they willing to pay for it themselves?
talk about breeding away our softer side?; 'It is not just that his views show how out of touch he and his PR team are with the nation and the real world, but Charles’ flippant remarks draw unwelcome attention to his own and his family’s close connections to Nazis, and related war-mongering.
His father Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was educated for a time in Nazi Germany and his four sisters married black-uniformed SS officers (three of them, Sophie, Cecile and Margarita, joining the Nazi party). Philip admitted to then having 'inhibitions about the Jews' to an American academic and feeling 'jealousy of their success.' Charles’ great uncle, the abdicated ex-King Edward VIII, was such a swastika-waver that MI6 had to banish him to Bermuda for the duration of World War Two, thwarting his and his Nazi wife Mrs Simpson’s attempts to join Hitler by crossing into occupied Europe.
Charles himself has come quite close to publicly endorsing Hitler’s slippery chief Architect and Armaments Minister Albert Speer by hiring Speer’s greatest devotee, Léon Krier, as his own chief architect for his Duchy of Cornwall’s extensive building projects. Writer and broadcaster Jonathan Meades in his 1994 documentary, ‘Jerry Building’ nails Krier as the ‘Speer-carrier’ and ‘Keeper of the Toxic Flame’, pointing out that every one of Speer’s creations, which include the Nuremberg rally stadium, is inseparable from the inhuman experimentation and forced concentration camp labor used to construct them.
Charles’ great grandfather George V was one of the three ‘great’ architects of World War One, the so-called ‘Cousins’ War’, four years of mindless slaughter that began exactly a century ago. With two more Saxe-Coburg Gotha cousins, George’s hapless subjects slugged it out in trench warfare with Germany’s Wilhelm II and Russia’s Nicholas II's unfortunates leaving, by 1918, a total of some ten million dead for no discernible purpose.
When in 1917 ill-mannered soldiers began pointing out that German Gotha bombers from another branch of the King’s family business were killing them, George V blithely announced that his surname was changing from ‘Saxe-Coburg Gotha’ to the more English-sounding ‘Windsor’.'
It seems silly to compare a kiwi to an ostrich. What's next, comparing bananas to snakes?
...once upon a time.
The sad thing about both the moa and the elephant bird is that these marvelous creatures were both doing fine up until a few hundred years ago. Unfortunately they both tasted a bit too much like chicken to our ancestors.
And here I was looking forward to an argument about how large birds and delicious fuzzy brown fruit are NOT in fact closely related.
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Yea, that 100 year thing has been known to be wrong for a while now. They have actual DNA from a T-Rex from 68 million years ago. Not common, but it happens on rare occasions.
There is also a guy trying to "clone" T-Rex from chickes by messing with the protiens as the chicken develops in the egg. I believe he has gotten teeth and a bigger tail from chickens doing this, just to prove its "somewhat possible".
Maybe we can get enough DNA to bring back these big birds. But then again it seems like our society screws things up. Remember the ostrich craze? People spent huge sums to get ostriches under the theory that an ostrich ranch was the next big thing. Supposedly businesses just could not get enough ostrich parts and the meat was going to be a big seller as well. The price of an ostrich passed 80K.. But none of us are seeing ostrich meat at the markets. I wonder how many millions were lost on the ostrich scams. The earth worm scam preceded the ostrich scam. People invested a lot of money getting supplies to start farming worms in warehouses. they were told that that the shampoo industry used protein from worms and all were told they could make a fortune with the worms doing the work.
If kiwis are related to the much bigger elephant birds, that might explain why they lay such ridiculously big eggs - they've shrunk but their eggs haven't caught up yet.
Radio NZ did a 40 minute interview with evolutionary biologist Alan Cooper (the lead researcher) on Saturday. It is well worth a listen if you've got the time.
How could an animal be more closely related to a piece of fruit than another animal?!