New Lemurs Found in Madagascar

BBC ^ | 9 August 2005 | Staff

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Now I'm bummed out. Thanks for the correction. ;)

[sandydipper]

Sorry! What do I know and when didn't I not know it?? I did remember it was a bird.

[RightWingAtheist]

The carriers are still flying, but all the passengers have been dropped off :)

[RightWingAtheist]

I was pretty bummed out when it turned out that fruit bats were real bats and not primates as was once speculated. I thought it would be cool to have them cousins (even if they do look like winged versions of the Taco Bell dog).

[Junior]

The planets.

[PatrickHenry]

For British royal dynasties: No Plan Like Yours To Study History.

Norman, Plantaganet, Lancaster, York, Tutor, Stuart, Hanover.

[Redcloak]

They found it in the rain forest, not the large intestine.

[RightWhale]

These are our cousins. We got the looks, they got the brains.

[wyattearp]

Lemurs are humanity's godson's uncle's cousin's husband.

Sounds like my ex-wife's family. (She had an aunt-cousin).

[najida]

I'm a sucker for cute and cuddly. So here's my Awwwww!

[mewzilla]

I took a course in primatology in college. We learned to speak lemur :)

[b_sharp]

"Interesting. I don't know how active a thread on Lemurs will get, but speciation on an island is just so darned ... Darwinian! I'm cranking up the ping list."

Sometimes you just have to sit back and appreciate all that is wrought by nature.

[b_sharp]

"2 million (insert maniacal laugh here) years of evolution, and it takes a genetic study to confirm that we have 2 slightly different species of lemur. But a few weeks ago we were treated to elephants 'evolving' towards tuskless in a matter of a couple dozen years. Hmmmmm..."

Is there some specific rate of change that can be classed as evolution, where anything faster or slower is not evolution?

[b_sharp]

"Every time they find a new species (which has been happening frequently lately), I can't help wondering how it was missed every time they decided such-and-such a bird/animal/plant/bug/fish/reptile was endangered and there were only 37 left in the world."

Perhaps these new species took so long to find because there are so few of them?

Finding a new species does not change the endangered state of related species. Remember that the working definition of speciation is the cessation of gene flow.

[b_sharp]

"Carrier pigeons are still around. It's passenger pigeons which are extinct :(

He simply got confused between those pigeons that carry cargo and those pigeons who used to carry people.

[Dimensio]

I remember a mnemonic for remembering the five stages of grief, but people here probably won't like it.

[LearnsFromMistakes]

Is there some specific rate of change that can be classed as evolution, where anything faster or slower is not evolution? (Science adjusts theories to fit evidence, creationism distorts evidence to fit the Bible.)

Far be it from me to put any parameters on this process. I have learned a lot from these threads, and that is one thing I won't do. I just made an observation...

[Bon mots]

Speaking of Brits...
"Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain"
(Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet). In an alternate version, "Battle" is replaced with "Birth".
This is to remember the order of colors in the spectrum.
Highlight above this sentence for the answer... ;-)

[MinorityRepublican]

Carrier pigeons are still around. It's passenger pigeons which are extinct :(

How would you clone a passenger pigeon?

Cloning in general works like this:

1. Remove the nucleus from a donor cell (a cell from the organism you are cloning).

2. Remove the nucleus of a host egg and replace it with the donor nucleus.

3. Stimulate the egg cell so it begins dividing as if it were fertilized.

4. Implant egg cell into appropriate host mother.

5. Wait for clone to be born.

Since we're dealing with birds, which have very large and delicate egg cells, the implanting part becomes very difficult. No one has successfully cloned any birds yet, just mammals. Assuming techniques to work around this difficulty are developed eventually, Passenger Pigeons present another problem -- they're extinct, so we don't have any living Passenger Pigeon cells to extract a nucleus from. Instead, we have preserved skins and skeletons, which might contain enough DNA to reconstruct the contents of the nucleus. To get this DNA and use it to produce a clone, you would need to:

1. Extract DNA from your sample.

2. Purify it, being extremely careful to avoid contamination with bacteria, human DNA, or other samples in the lab.

3. Amplify it via a polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

4. Remove mitochondrial DNA.

5. Assemble the fragments of nuclear DNA into chromosomes.

6. Package the chromosomes into a nucleus. (Hypothetically -- we're not sure how to do this yet.)

7. Proceed with the cloning procedure outlined above.

This is all quite difficult, especially steps 5 and 6. It also relies on there being sufficient nuclear DNA present in the sample to extract, amplify, and assemble.

[jennyp]

Kweel - we need to extract DNA from them so that their species will not vanish - like the carrier pigeons.

I wonder how they'd do as pets. If chimpanzees weren't so violent when they got to be adults, we could raise them as pets, and in a couple generations the animal shelters would be so overrun with chimps they'd be euthanizing them and pleading with people to spay their pets to keep the chimpanzee population down.