Chewing surface of two lower teeth of a 20 million-year-old cane rat discovered by scientists at a hominoid locality in northern Uganda. The specimen is at the Uganda National Museum, Kampala. (Credit: Dale Winkler, SMU)
Posted on 01/01/2011 5:35:14 PM PST by SunkenCiv
odents get a bad rap as vermin and pests because they seem to thrive everywhere. They have been one of the most common mammals in Africa for the past 50 million years. From deserts to rainforests, rodents flourished in prehistoric Africa, making them a stable and plentiful source of food, says paleontologist Alisa J. Winkler, an expert on rodent and rabbit fossils... Rodents can corroborate evidence from geology and plant and animal fossils about the ancient environments of our human ancestors and other prehistoric mammals, says Winkler, a research professor at Southern Methodist University... Rodents -- rats, mice, squirrels, porcupines, gerbils and others -- are the largest order of living mammals, constituting 42 percent of the total mammalian diversity worldwide... review documents more than 130 formally named genera in "Fossil Rodents of Africa," the first comprehensive summary and distribution analysis of Africa's fossil rodents since 1978. The analysis is a chapter in the new 1008-page scientific reference book "Cenozoic Mammals of Africa" ...the first comprehensive scientific review of Africa's fossil mammals in more than three decades. The book comprises 48 chapters by 64 experts, summarizing and interpreting the published fossil research to date of Africa's mammals, tectonics, geography, climate and flora of the past 65 million years.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Chewing surface of two lower teeth of a 20 million-year-old cane rat discovered by scientists at a hominoid locality in northern Uganda. The specimen is at the Uganda National Museum, Kampala. (Credit: Dale Winkler, SMU)
Rats go way back
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There’s a close association between vermin and pests and Rats.
and disease
65 million years is a rather extraordinary extrapolation. Science used to be testable.
Was that before global warming?
Hmmm. Prehistoric rodents...
Modern democRATS anyone?
>Rodents Were Diverse and Abundant in Prehistoric Africa When Our Human Ancestors Evolved
Yeah - they evolved into politicians.
and poverty, corruption, murder, etc.
What scares me is with all the food regulation going on and our food industry being systematically taken apart by the Marxists, eventually rats will be a popular protein in the big cities.
Seems to me they’re diverse and abundant now. Just today with our grand daughter we were admiring a squirrel lunching on a decorative pumpkin out on the patio. “Who needs Yellowstone?” was my thought.
And cats. One reason people think that cats became “domesticated” (sort of) later than dogs is that dogs were useful to humans during their earlier time as hunters, whereas cats only became useful to have around when humans moved to a more agricultural existence (coinciding with larger concentrations of humans in cities). The cats were useful to kill the rats that ate the stored grain.
And cats. One reason people think that cats became “domesticated” (sort of) later than dogs is that dogs were useful to humans during their earlier time as hunters, whereas cats only became useful to have around when humans moved to a more agricultural existence (coinciding with larger concentrations of humans in cities). The cats were useful to kill the rats that ate the stored grain.
Sorry about double post. Just loaded a new operating system and it is a little different than what I am used to.
That makes a lot of sense, plus one wouldn’t mind an aloof cat that was an effective hunter. An aloof dog just causes trouble. :0)
The Basic Non Evolution of Modern Man
Other than that, the thing about the 65M years has turned out to be bullshit (all the blood and raw meat turning up in dinosaur remains recently):
QED allows spontaneous sentient behavior, it even predicts it. Wo be unto them....
Except our ancient ancestors did not “evolve”...
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