Posted on 02/03/2005 12:21:09 PM PST by 68skylark
Talk about deep thoughts.
Abyssians??
..nothing has been shown, that he still isn't. IMHO, These Organisms are still a much higher (on many levels) lifeform than many (if not all) Washington D.C. Liberals. :^)
Thanks.. :^)
Don't feel bad, you're in good company. I'm going to go genuflect or something now.
I did not have sex with that sea canyon, the Merianas trench.
I wonder how far down a full beer can would make it before being crushed like a bug?
"We were talking, a day or so ago, about "new" phyla. This is the sort of thing I was thinking about. (Whether this is a good example or not, I haven't a clue.) It could be happening, or be on the verge of happening, almost all the time. It's difficult to know except after millions of years of hindsight."
As a bugologist, IMHO, these are more likely an old group, just newly discovered, especially since the authors said they were related to the oldest branch of the forams.
"They can dig a sea-floor core and look for older specimens. They might be fossilized. (I'm not sure if fossils of such animals are possible, and I'm not sure they can operate a dig that deep.)"
A sea floor core is technically possibly, but very difficult at that depth. The bugs are "soft shelled", so a fossil is possible, but highly unlikely. Think of a foram as a single celled snail. Hard shelled forams are very common fossils.
Seems likely. I was just using this as an example. A new body type could pop up. In a crowded world it would have a tough time, and it would take forever for it -- and its ever-varying progeny -- to be recognized as a new phylum. The whole conjecture was in response to a question about "why don't we see new phyla"?
"The whole conjecture was in response to a question about "why don't we see new phyla"?"
I think the answer is simply that we have too short a time frame (say a couple hundred years since people have really been looking - not enough time for anything to happen from an evolution point of view, except extinction).
The forams form one of the best cases for "punctuated equilibrium". There's a 10 million year stretch of great fossil data from the late miocene to the present.
(Malmgren, B.A., W.A. Berggren and G.P. Lohmann. 1983. Evidence for punctuated gradualism in the Late Neocene Globorotalia tumida lineage of Planktonic Foraminifera. Paleobiology 9:377-89.
I've heard that even extracting and preserving the top samples from that depth is quite difficult.
Perhaps the fossil record doesn't reflect that these are the oldest creatures, but rather the deepest creatures. That would account for them being at the lowest levels.
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