Posted on 12/05/2005 11:35:29 PM PST by dangus
My thoughts ,is it made up to stop the deveolopment of the forest. What better way then to come up with a animal that isn't there.
We know there is only a couple we need to protect the forest so they are not killed.
I can see it's wings! Can't you?
Looks to me like it's eating Cheerios, so how can it be a carnivore? Plus its tail is plugged into an electric outlet so its eyes glow. I think this is a display from Toys R Us.
I am not aware of the "viverrid", however I do know that there are some wierd cats here in Djakarta that can be seen walking atop walls and roofs at night, and are said to be a cross between a civet cat and a mongoose.
Two weeks ago, some creature killed all the koi in my fish pond, but did not eat them. They all had gouge marks on their bellies. The catfish were untouched, as were the janitor fish. My missus says it was done by a snake, but I suspect the "viverrid".
Times UK are suggesting this might be a newly evolved species! (rather than an old one newly discovered).
Actually, the funny thing is that Brontosaurs are said to have had brains in their ass! Seriously. There was what is more properly called a "ganglial mass" of neurons near the Brontosaurs' tookus. A lot of dinosaur stuff since I read about that has turned out to be silly misunderstandings, so I may be quoting ridiulously out-of-date stuff, but the though was that it serves as a sort of secondary brainstem, because the hind quarters were so far from the skull, and neural electrochemical transmission is actually very slow.
>> Why did you post that? I can't stop seeing it from the wrong end any more! <<
I'm really bad at doing to that to people. :^D I ruined my pastor's favorite recording of Handel's Messiah by singing it as "Come for Tea, My People." It's not my fault the singers can't properly annunciate of the letter "Y." (If they're going to sing about the birth of the Messiah, they should be able to make a proper annunciation!)
... If you've been culturally deprived, it should be sung as "Comfort Ye, My People."
>> It looks to me like a type of . <<
My girlfriend has lots of those.
>> But I have seen cuscus sometimes with the tail stretched out in that manner. <<
Is that what they make cuscus out of? Isn't it spelled cous-cous? That's how my ex-girlfriend spelled it, and she should know... She's Lesbian! (She hates it when I call her that for some reason, but she was born in Beirut.)
>> Times UK are suggesting this might be a newly evolved species! (rather than an old one newly discovered). <<
Now that's just plain silly. Speciaition is the inability to interbreed. Newly acquired phylogenic traits (i.e., a genetic change resulting in an altered appearance) are said to LEAD to speciation, but if an organism is so profoundly unique that speciation occurs immediately, by definition, it cannot reproduce. When that happens, it's simply called a "birth defect."
People do misunderstand that evolution can be sudden in the sense that a mutation takes a single generation to occur. But the propigation of that gene takes a long time from the perspective of human history... even though it appears instantaneous from the perspective of billions of years of geological history.
If speciation does occur due to a sudden new phylogenic trait, first enough inter-breeding has to occur to establish a fair-sized population of organisms with that trait. Eventually, offspring of two parents with that trait may cease to recognize that those without the trait are potential mates. Or those with the trait and those without it may become seperated. (For instance, superior vision in dim light may make one species choose hunting grounds deeper in a forest.) Then, when additional genetic mutations occur, they aren't shared among the two groups, and the organisms become more and more dissimilar.
This may make the term "speciation" seem surprisingly relative. It is. It's always a judgment call as to when two races or subspecies of organisms should be said to have speciated. For instance, two dissimilar subspecies may still be perfectly capable of interbreeding, but geographically isolated. But with land bridges and the like, that can change rapidly. And what constitutes geographic isolation? For small creatures, being in a different forest may be more of an isolation than bears being on seperate continents.
In any event, the notion that a species "just evolved" is ridiculous.
You're out of date. There is no such thing as a Brontosaur anymore. They are Apatosaurs now. What they thought was a Brontosaur turned out to be a misidentification of a Apatosaur, so the earlier discovered one, the Apatosaur, gets to keep the name and Brontosaurs are no more.
That's a new one on me... He's kinda neat looking. In Narnia, he'd be quite treacherous.
Looks a bit like a mongoose.
Thanks. After less than one second, I saw it just fine, but the lightening up of the photo is certainly nice.
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