Posted on 03/06/2006 8:39:50 AM PST by presidio9
An elephant?
Does this mean that it's Bush's fault?
Underwater ally ping.
I wonder what Sir Court Godfrey would have to say...?
PS: "Sir Court Godfrey and the Local Wizards" would be a good name for a rock band.
Whatever he feels like! Gosh!
Saint Columba saw and rebuked the Loch Ness monster in the 500's.
Greta hopes it takes this long to solve the Natallie Halloway case.
"This is Mrs. Anne Elk -- ahem! -- I have a theory -- ahem! My theory, which is mine, is that the brontasaurus was thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin at the other end. Ahem!"
Elephants are excellent swimmers. They have been known to hop sea islands between India and Sri Lanka.
Elephants are excellent swimmers.
I didn't know that!
LoL!
New research suggests that the animals evolved from mammals like the sea cow which is still found in some of the world's oceans.
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Ann Gaeth: " Elephants are weird animals" |
Ann Gaeth, at the University of Melbourne, Australia, had the rare opportunity to look at the foetuses after her colleague, Roger Short, was sent the specimens from the Kruger National Park in South Africa. The foetuses were taken from elephants killed in a culling operation in 1993.
Ancestral features
She found that all the elephant foetuses contained a physiological curiosity called a nephrostome. This is a funnel-shaped kidney duct found only in freshwater fish, frogs and egg-laying reptiles and mammals.
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Elephants were once at home in the ocean |
The nephrostomes appear very early in embryo development and then disappear. "Something that appears early in gestation is much more likely to be ancestral. Those features that appear later in development are likely to be related to more recent adaptations," says Ms Gaeth.
Ms Gaeth says that fossil evidence indicates that elephants left behind their aquatic life about 30m years ago. She has identified changes to their bodies that have occurred to adapt them to life on land.
Up periscopes
Their lungs now allow the elephants to suck up a large amount of water in their trunks and hold it there, before letting it gush into their mouths.
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The youngest embryo studied was 58 days old and 4mm long |
Modern elephants still use their trunks in this way. When Asian elephants used for logging are required to travel from one island to another, they frequently swim.
Their necks are too short to allow them to breathe with their mouths, so the trunk is pushed up like a periscope and used as a snorkel.
Internal testicles
Further embryonic evidence that elephants once swam is that, unlike other land-living mammals, they have internal testicles and always have done. Seals and whales also have internal testicles, but only acquired them when their land-living ancestors took to the seas 60m years ago.
Fossil studies of elephant ancestry have been supplemented in recent years by DNA, biochemical and immunological evidence, all of which show that aquatic beginnings were likely. The modern elephants' nearest relatives are the sea cows - dugongs and manatees.
This latest work, backing up these suggestions, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Shame on you.
The Loch Ness monster is a pine tree.
The Loch Ness monster is a miniature fake.
The Loch Ness monster is a product of public drunkeness.
The Loch Ness monster is a waterfowl.
The Loch Ness monster is an elephant.
(and the list goes on and on)
LOL I finally saw that movie last night.
You will never be the same.
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