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Evolution Isn't Easy

Displaying 1 - 24 of 24
Three concentric azure blue circles
Urantia Paper: Planetary Mortal Epochs • Wed 2020 Sep 16, 11:54am

…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.…

"…they became extinct more than thirty thousand years ago…"

Mentioned five times in the Urantia Papers.

The Last Fandor
Our flying fellows' final fate.
Mindful Webworks UB Comix page from 1996.

Ben G Thomas, YouTube • Wed 2020 Sep 16, 10:30am

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.

YouTube video, 8:05

DDG search on "teratorn birds"

Fishy Fish
Nate Church, Breitbart • Fri 2018 Apr 13, 1:51pm

…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…

Soon to be a SyFy movie series.
Mary Bowerman, USA Today • Tue 2018 Mar 13, 2:59pm

Headline: 'National Geographic' delves into its past: 'For decades our coverage was racist'…

I rarely say this, but: Oh, FFS!

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

Douglas Fox, Nature • Fri 2016 Feb 19, 6:52pm

…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.…

Gavin Allen, Daily Mail UK • Fri 2015 Oct 23, 10:18am

…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. …

Turtle
Rachel Nuwer, Smithsonian • Wed 2015 Jul 1, 7:13am

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.…

Fishy Fish
Jeanna Bryner, Live Science • Sun 2015 May 17, 10:30am

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.

Mark Prigg, UK Daily Mail • Thu 2015 Mar 5, 1:15pm

…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….'

livescience.com • Wed 2011 May 18, 9:16pm

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.

Rhamphorhynchus
sciencedaily.com • Thu 2009 Jun 18, 7:22pmScientists have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. The finding, they say, demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought, and offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.
sciencedaily.com • Sun 2009 Jun 14, 9:01pm…a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight — and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs…. may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs….
chimp
news.bbc.co.uk • Thu 2009 Jun 4, 3:05pmResearch in tickling apes and infants suggests laughter evolved in a common ancestor more than 10 million years ago.
chimp
online.wsj.com • Tue 2009 May 19, 7:37pma leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans. Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today's lemurs in Madagascar. Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.
msnbc.msn.com • Thu 2009 Apr 30, 9:18pm

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....

Fishy
sciencedaily.com • Wed 2009 Mar 25, 10:54pmResearchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex. ... "If you start with the simplest possible animal body, then there's only one direction to evolve in — you have to become more complex.... Sooner or later, however, you reach a level of complexity where it's possible to go backwards and become simpler again. "What's astonishing is that hardly any crustaceans have taken this backwards route. Instead, almost all branches have evolved in the same direction, becoming more complex in parallel. "This is the nearest thing to a pervasive evolutionary rule that's been found. "Of course, there are exceptions within the crustacean family tree, but most of these are parasites, or animals living in remote habitats such as isolated marine caves. "For those free-living animals in the 'rat-race' of evolution, it seems that competition may be the driving force behind the trend. "What's new about our results is that they show us how this increase in complexity has occurred. Strikingly, it looks far more like a disciplined march than a milling crowd."
sciencedaily.com • Wed 2009 Mar 4, 9:41pm

Fishyscientists 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.

sciencedaily.com • Wed 2009 Mar 4, 9:41pm

Crowa 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.

chimp
evolutionnews.org • Sat 2009 Feb 21, 8:00pm

[This site is not what one might presume the domain name means; it is, rather, a site for Intelligent Design believers.]

chimp
csmonitor.com • Wed 2009 Feb 11, 11:44pm

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.

Turtlechimp
msnbc.msn.com • Wed 2009 Feb 11, 11:44pm

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...

chimp
livescience.com • Wed 2009 Feb 11, 11:43pm

"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.

chimp
news.nationalgeographic.com • Wed 2009 Feb 11, 11:43pm

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.

nytimes.com • Mon 2009 Feb 9, 8:28pm

ChimpDarwin'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.