Evolution Isn't Easy
…But early in this era mortals learn to kindle and maintain fire, and with the increase of inventive imagination and the improvement in tools, evolving man soon vanquishes the larger and more unwieldy animals. The early races also make extensive use of the larger flying animals. These enormous birds are able to carry one or two average-sized men for a nonstop flight of over five hundred miles. On some planets these birds are of great service since they possess a high order of intelligence, often being able to speak many words of the languages of the realm. These birds are most intelligent, very obedient, and unbelievably affectionate. Such passenger birds have been long extinct on Urantia, but your early ancestors enjoyed their services.…
Mentioned five times in the Urantia Papers.
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The Last Fandor
Our flying fellows' final fate.
Mindful Webworks UB Comix page from 1996.
Millions of years ago giant birds of prey ruled the Americas - the Teratorns. But our understanding of these animals has changed greatly in the last few decades.
…At an estimated 85 feet in length, the newly discovered ichthyosaur might just be the biggest prehistoric creature ever recorded.… 25 percent larger than the largest ichthyosaur jaw ever discovered…
Headline: 'National Geographic' delves into its past: 'For decades our coverage was racist'…
All society was far more racist in the past than now. We progress. (National Geographic apparently missed that.) In fact, now, NatGeog can show white gals' bare boobs. Progress!
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." —L. P. Hartley
…over the past several years, discoveries have begun to yield some tantalizing clues about the end of the Ediacaran. Evidence gathered from the Namibian reefs and other sites suggests that earlier theories were overly simplistic — that the Cambrian explosion actually emerged out of a complex interplay between small environmental changes that triggered major evolutionary developments.
Some scientists now think that a small, perhaps temporary, increase in oxygen suddenly crossed an ecological threshold, enabling the emergence of predators. The rise of carnivory would have set off an evolutionary arms race that led to the burst of complex body types and behaviours that fill the oceans today.…
But last year, a major study1 of ancient sea-floor sediments challenged that view.… oxygen could already have been abundant enough “for a long, long time before”.… The gradual emergence of predators, driven by a small rise in oxygen, would have meant trouble for Ediacaran animals that lacked obvious defences.…
…However, in a 2003 study the same team from the University of Illinois showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in bacteria was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome, which is found in many single-celled eukaryotes.
This meant that the acidocalcisomes arose before the bacterial and eukaryotic lineages of the tree of life split, making the organelle even more ancient than realised. …
Pappochelys is critical for understanding “a new stage in the evolution of the turtle body plan,” the researchers write. Prior to this discovery, a 220-million-year-old specimen from China, which displayed a partly formed shell and other turtle-like features, was the closest thing experts had to a seemingly sure-fire turtle relative. Other specimens, including a 260-million-year-old fossil from South Africa, were hypothesized to represent an even earlier turtle ancestor, but with such a large temporal gap separating them from the China specimen, researchers could not say for sure. Morphologically and chronologically, Pappochelys fits neatly between the two specimens, tying them together.…
The moonfish, which are about the size of a manhole cover, is now considered the first-known warm-blooded fish, scientists report in the journal Science. Through some physiological tricks, the fish is able to keep its entire body — heart, brain, swimming muscles and viscera — warmer than the surrounding water.
…new insights into the life of the world's oldest and most primitive primate. …Purgatorius… tiny and agile animal spent much of its time eating fruit and climbing trees 66 million years ago… first known below-the-head bones for Purgatorius… previously only teeth… 'The ankle bones show that it had a mobile ankle joint like primates today that live in trees…. This mobility would have allowed for rotating the foot in different directions as it adjusted to different angles presented by tree trunks and branches. It also shows that the first primates did not have elongate ankles that you see in many living primates today that are thought to be related to leaping behaviours….'
A group of researchers agrees that Earth is facing a mass extinction event, but they are daring to overturn dogma on how fast species are disappearing. The researchers say they have discovered why current estimates are overblown, and they recommend a different way to calculate the rates.
Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved... nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa... The so-called "Cape-colored" population of South Africa has highest levels of mixed ancestry on the globe, a blend of African, European, East Asian and South Indian... about 71 percent of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to western African origins. They also have between 13 percent and 15 percent European ancestry and a smaller amount of other African origins. There was "very little" evidence for American Indian genes among African-Americans....
scientists have proposed a new theory for how a universal molecular machine, the ribosome, managed to self-assemble as a critical step in the genesis of all life on Earth.
a major new theory for the evolution of flight that is changing textbooks around the world. It involves wing-assisted incline running and a fundamental bird wing angle.
[This site is not what one might presume the domain name means; it is, rather, a site for Intelligent Design believers.]
In June of last year, Louisiana became the first state to pass what has become known as an "academic freedom" law. In the past, fights over evolution took place at the local school board level, but academic freedom proponents specifically target state legislatures.
There are no big scandals. Darwin was squeaky clean — a homebody (once he returned from the HMS Beagle voyage) and good husband — hardly the rapscallion image you might have of someone who sailed the seas for five years as a young man and later developed a theory that has rarely ceased to stir controversy since it was published 150 years ago. However, there are some strange facts about Darwin: Stinky feet... Iffy on marriage... Christian, then agnostic... Sickly life...
"Darwin" will be the most comprehensive exhibit ever mounted on the British naturalist, whose ideas transformed biology and sparked a religious debate that is playing out in courtrooms, statehouses and school board meetings across the United States.
For the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12, 2009), National Geographic News asked leading scientists for their picks of the most important fossils that show evolution in action—seven of which are presented here, starting with this "fishapod." Discovered in Arctic Canada in 2004, 375 million-year-old Tiktaalik had not only gills and scales but traits of a tetrapod (four-legged land animal), including limblike fins, ribs, a flexible neck, and a croc-shaped head.
Darwin's theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory's existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part.