The project Assembling the Tree of Life is trying to map all species in a huge Darwinian tree and filling in the blanks. By combining all known common genomes and resulting physical traits, out came the below image.
An ugly rat-like creature out of which whales, cats, dogs, weasels, and all other placental mammals developed. And yes, even us humans…
Sometimes I wish I could believe in Creationism: everything better than descending from a sort of rat with a head which even rats themselves would dislike.
Oh, and the same research debunked another favorite of mine. The idea that mammals lived together with the great dinosaurs. The evidence is clear; no chance we ever encountered T-rex or his mates. Not even our ugly predecessor did. We mammals had to wait until they were extinct to become such a winning formula.
Science is bad for illusions, but that´s no news 😉
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6120/662.full.pdf #EveryDayScience
A rat?! Damn it Max. Now so many things about corporatedom make sense!
Not to mention politics.
A huge disappointment? That's almost exactly how they were depicted in my school books thirty years ago!
That would make it an even bigger disappointment +Víktor Bautista i Roca All that gene decoding tech and no improvement over an apparently old rat …
That's a good point of view, +Max Huijgen
Drawings of the first mammals: http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurpictures/ig/Mesozoic-Mammal-Pictures/
And the link between reptiles and mammals:
http://coldfire107.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/musings-of-a-media-megazostrodon/
Ah, speaking out against creationism costed me at least 3 followers. Self selection, Darwinian style in followers 😉
+Max Huijgen 🙂
Except that the new research shows that dinosaurs and mammals never lived together.
+Max Huijgen The moment you tell me there were no unicorns I will uncircle you!
Unicorns were found by North-Korean scientists so won´t argue with that +David Amerland
(was by the way just a mistranslation as the North-Koreans never claimed it, but alas it made the internetz come alive=
dude, the resemblance is uncanny — you have his eyes, for sure!
aww… i think the rat's actually cute 😛
you know, the kind of thing id be proud to descend from.
+Max Huijgen I find it humbling and awe-inspiring.
+Max Huijgen _«Except that the new research shows that dinosaurs and mammals never lived together.»_
In fact, mammals have been living together with dinosaurs all of our history. So shows new research that says birds are dinosaurs.
And even if you erroneously don't count birds as dinosaurs, mammals were there when old school dinosaurs had not yet extinguished. It's just placental mammals that came later, according to this new study.
Ugly is an overstatement- he looks like a survivor! Honestly, it supports the phrase "Greatness from small beginnings."
+Max Huijgen but that tail is fabulous…
Dinosaurs are not extinct, they are everywhere, freaking flying feathered avian dinosaurs
The psychology hasn't advanced quite as dramatically as the physical manifestations, though, eh?
I don't think many people have noticed +Peter Strempel. Sadly. Or not..
Well, Giselle, I would probably be lynched for saying so, but just looking like a human being doesn't make it so. What apparently sets us apart as a species is the capacity to think creatively (read also critically, iteratively, and even collectively), but it is a capacity that remains untapped in many 'people'.
As long as we're building a gallows, please hang a rope up there for me (make it silk, would you?)+Peter Strempel because I shall be lynched for suggesting that for all of our supposed evolution, some furry four-leggeds seem far kinder, decidedly more intuitive and clever, guileless even, and infinitely more grateful than their clean-shaven human owners.
Personally I'm inclined to resist – forcefully – being lynched by the ignorant self-righteous. We should join forces, not contemplate our demise.
I saw a quite lovely and moving movie about kindness and love – Amour – you should see it, Peter.
Too sad for me, Giselle. Too close to home.
I know what you mean, Peter. For me, too…that's why I wanted to see it, however. In the end it gives me hope…
Apologies for the threadjack +Max Huijgen but it is in some circles a topic of conversation – how we evolve in the humanity department.
+Peter Strempel: Creative thinking turns out to be rather widespread among vertebrate animals, at least (and cephalopods). Ultimately, there will be no single trait that separates humans from other animals, because we are part of a continuous lineage of descent. That said, our most unique trait appears to be our social learning capacity; particularly our ability to learn even from those that are deceased (via recorded language). Chimpanzees can learn complex languages, for example (sign language), but they are remarkably poor at teaching them to other chimps. In many other mental tasks they out perform their closest relatives (i.e. Homo sapiens).
+Max Huijgen: Great post! Just as a minor clarification – the study does not demonstrate that mammals and dinosaurs didn't coexist (the first mammals and the first dinosaurs are of similar age, Late Triassic, about 230 million years old). Instead, it seems to suggest that the origins of many of the specific living groups of mammals may have come later. That is, the major living groups may have diverged from each other after the end-Cretaceous extinction.
Thanks for the clarification +Michael Habib and +Víktor Bautista i Roca I didn´t have access to the original study.
The downward trend in number of followers continued over night. House cleaning by self selection 🙂
No thread of mine can go astray by added intelligence +Giselle Minoli Discourse is thread improvement.
+Michael Habib You say that Chimpanzees 'can learn' complex languages. Is being 'taught' such languages the same as being able to devise them? 'Aping' (pardon the phrase) or immitating is not quite the same as creating/inventing.
It may be that there is no literally single trait that separates homo sapiens from other species, but it is quite evident that we are the only ones to construct and leave behind complex artefacts which require creativity PLUS iteration, cooperation, longitudinal knowledge propagation, innovation, etc, etc.
These traits appeared to work reasonably well in relatively small social collectives without written language (or should that be, without a high degree of literacy). Consider artisans in post-Roman Europe passing on skills by demonstration/apprenticeships, not books.
Relatively well developed language skills seem to be key for the ´lift-off` of mankind +Peter Strempel It seems to be the big differentiator as so far no animals have been found with a language capable of expressing complex thoughts.
I agree though on the definition of homo sapiens as the best combination of traits.
Aww, that little guy looks like a survivor! Maybe I just think that because of the opossumness of it.
Everything else I was going to clarify has already been covered, for the most part. Good job fact people!
"Facts"
Oh you mean natural laws like the laws of thermodynamics, logic and such?
Yes it is kind of hard to argue against logic…
I'm pretty pragmatic. If, say, a particular sort of prayer to one particular deity could be demonstrated to produce consistent, reproducible results under specific circumstances, I'd be all over that, even if nobody had a good explanation for why it worked.
+Angyl Bender I can get behind that.
Just the fact that it is reproducible in a controlled environment is what the sceptics society and James Randi have required all along.
And while it may be incomprehensible to begin with, it is a hood start that makes it possible to experiment and figure out what is happening and why.
And after a few years or decades of research we'll know how it works, why it works and can repackage it into something more effective as a delivery method.
I'm still waiting for the pharmaceutucal biz ti release a common medicine in potion bottles with 1up printed on em.
+Michael Habib Interesting point. In this modern world, quite aside from our evolutionary biology, our creative legacies are almost as important and quite possibly becoming more important than our biological legacies. What we create, what we choose to leave others – art, music, photography, poetry, architecture, literature, philosophy – leads to learning over time. Some people leave children behind…others leave different perhaps more dynamic legacies. Purely biological issue could lead to our ultimate demise. Sadly, for reasons I am afraid to go into here.
+chris vighagen good reminder. Placebo is something that we don't exactly understand how it works, or even if it's one or many things, but it is an effect demonstrated in trials again and again. In some areas (anxiety, chronic pain) medicines can even have problems beating it.