I found myself getting really frustrated while watching "nature" video's on Dinosaurs. Imagine a CG animated Velociraptor bouncing around in the woods cocking his head like a cute puppy, squeaking and grunting to display emotion. The voice-over would say something like "The Velociraptor is a very curious dinosaur. But don't get in the way when he's hungry!"
What?! Stupid/annoying. I wanted to learn some hard facts about new findings on dinosaurs but all I keep getting is catered toward ages 5+
I recently read Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Were Dinosaurs Dumb?" and it began an obsession with dinosaurs that I've really never ever had before. When we take into account the 200 million years that dinosaurs existed, the image of a slow, lumbering beast just doesn't make sense for all that evolutionary time.
Yes, during those 200 million years some dinosaur species died out, some evolved, some stayed put, but what we're slowly finding out is how bizarre and diverse of a species they are. Dinosaurs are closely related to birds (we all probably know that theory) but then there's this gem: They were possibly warm blooded. Plus, some might have had social structures more similar to that of large mammals like elephants and lions rather than birds or reptiles. That could mean sophisticated hunting methods, mating rituals, and social structures, really changing the typical imagery from your elementary school science text book.
Of course, all of these theories are totally arguable, but it really makes one thing clear, we have no idea what dinosaurs were really like.
So, look at this scale that we've all seen in high school or college bio 101:
Now try and really grasp how many living species would clutter this list if we could write ever single one down--the approximate year of evolving and appearing, and the approximate year of extinction, throughout Earths entire history. The number would be infinite. And then there we are, the last thin slice of the graph. What we see, know, and experience in a blink in evolutionary time.
Now think about the labels we use to define living things. Cold blooded, warm blooded; mammal, reptile; live birth, laying eggs; plant, animal. With all of the millions and billions of animals that have walked, slithered, or swam on earth, are these groupings forcing extinct species into a present-day mold we've set up for them? Are we pigeonholing our extinct or alive-but-weird creatures? I've looked around and found some animals that muddle our understanding of traditional species categorization. So, now I present, ROGUE SPECIES OF 2014!
Startin' off simple with the popular Platypus! Underwater, furry, warm-blooded, egg-laying, with poisonous talons and excreting milk-pores instead of nipples?? Yup! Un-categorisable. I wonder though, given all of the many bizarre creatures in the world, how the Platypus got to be the one that got turned into mascots and stuffed animals? I suppose duck-bills are pretty funny.
Ok, I admit, the Platypus is an obvious one. Then I find the Echidna, which just looks like a mini Anteater at first. Like the Platapus, they're warm-blooded, egg-laying, duck-billed critters that milk their young out of milk-patches. Then I read this nugget from a BBC article:
"Half of an echidna's brain is made up of neocortex - the so-called grey matter that allows mammals to reason, learn and remember. A human brain is about one third neocortex."
Wait, what?! Are they brilliant? Is that the reason that they are the longest surviving mammal, "existing for over 120 million years"? Or is it because they're the only land mammal that can sense the electromagnetic signals emitted by all living things? Sharks can also sense elecromagnetic signals, but they're totally lacking a neocortex (Echidna - 1; Sharks - 0). These little guys could hunt you down, outwit you, then lick your face with their long anteater tongue.
Endangered, incredibly rare, and only surviving in Papau New Guinea (and maybe Australia?), the Echidna has proved difficult for scientists to study.
Side note: Read the Wikipedia article if you want to hear about its terrifying penis.
Endangered, incredibly rare, and only surviving in Papau New Guinea (and maybe Australia?), the Echidna has proved difficult for scientists to study.
Side note: Read the Wikipedia article if you want to hear about its terrifying penis.
Looks normal, right? Wrong! Cold-blooded! Yup, a cold-blooded "mammal". At a foot and a half tall, the cave goat grew super slowly, moved super slowly, and would have pretty much been extinct in a second (rather than living for 5 million years) had it lived on an island with any major predators. The particular island in the Mediterranean where the goat lived was super barren. So, with little food and no predators, apparently the cave goat adjusted a super slow and flexible metabolism, like a reptile. So slow, in fact, that rather than growing at a consistent pace, like warm-blooded animals, it grew in spurts based around food availability, as cold-blooded animals do.
Other things the Cave Goat had to save energy:
- super small eyes
- tiny brain
- inability to run, jump, or move fast
- super, super small babies that take a really long time to reach maturity
Obviously, the lil fella was killed off pretty easily when humans arrived.
What else lived around the Cave Goat? Just a giant doormouse, no big deal! Oh, the evolutionary beauty that is a predator-less island...
Next we have the Adactylidium, a mite with strange birthing habits. So...um...in lieu of shock and a loss of words, here is the Wikipedia article:
"The pregnant female mite feeds upon a single egg of a thrips, growing five to eight female offspring and one male in her body. The offspring devour their mother from the inside out,[2] and the single male mite mates with all the daughters when they are still in the mother. The females, now impregnated, cut holes in their mother's body so that they can emerge to find new thrips eggs. The male emerges as well, but does not look for food or new mates, and dies after a few hours. The females die at the age of 4 days, when their own offspring eat them alive from the inside."
And there you have it! Would you even consider this "birthing"? I just...I just have no words. But, what all of this--Platapus, Echnida, Cave Goat, Adactylidium--says to me, is that I don't think I've ever grasped the massive life span of the earth clearly enough. And I don't know if I ever will be able to. I can't expand my mind enough to imagine what other animals could have lived, what earth could have been. It's really beyond my comprehension and imagination. What if there were tons of tiny cold-blooded, furry, live birthing critters running around for millions of years? Small animal fossils are quite hard to find due to their fragility and size, so we easily wouldn't know. If we know electromagnetism is the way the Echnida and sharks find prey, what other chemical or physical senses have animals had in the past? Rather than the past, what about now? And my god, what other methods of birthing have there been?!?
I'll end with an awesome quote from Stephen Jay Gould comparing our small glimpse of live on earth to the day-long life of a Mayfly in April:
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages burried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
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I'm totally going to paint a cave goat:
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| These are normal warm blooded goats. |
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| Possible Cave Goat painting. Lil odd-one-out cutie... |
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