| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
25 Feb 2006 02:57:56 AM |
| Object: |
Furry Remains Shake Up Jurassic Thinking |
They were eager beavers, off to an early start. O_-
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-sci-beaver25feb25,1,6157261.story?coll=la-news-a_section
Now we wait for the godbots stupid enough to say this
"disproofs evilushun"!
Bob Dog
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Furry Remains Shake Up Jurassic Thinking
The beaver-like animal indicates mammals played a greater role
than long believed.
From Associated Press
February 25 2006
The discovery of the remains of a furry, beaver-like animal that
lived at the time of dinosaurs has overturned more than a
century of scientific thinking about Jurassic mammals.
The find shows that the role of mammals in the time of dinosaurs
was greater than previously thought, said Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of
vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in
Pittsburgh.
The animal is the earliest swimming mammal to have been found
and was the most primitive mammal to be preserved with fur,
which is important to helping keep a constant body temperature,
Luo said.
For a century, the stereotype of mammals living in that era has
been of tiny, shrew-like creatures scurrying about in the
underbrush trying to avoid the giant creatures that dominated
the planet, Luo said.
Now, a research team that included Luo has found that 164
million years ago, a mammal with a flat, scaly tail like a
beaver, vertebrae like an otter and teeth like a seal was
swimming in lakes and eating fish, according to their report in
the current issue of the journal Science.
The team, led by Qiang Ji of the Chinese Academy of Geological
Sciences in Beijing, discovered the remains in the Inner
Mongolia region of China.
Thomas Martin of the Senckenberg Research Institute in
Frankfurt, Germany, said the discovery pushed back the mammal
conquest of the waters by about 100 million years.
It's the first evidence that some ancient mammals were
semiaquatic, indicating a greater diversification than
previously thought, the researchers said.
Modern semiaquatic mammals such as beavers and otters and
aquatic mammals like whales did not appear until between 55
million years ago and 25 million years ago, they said.
The new animal is not related to modern beavers or otters but
has features similar to them. Thus the researchers named it
Castorocauda lutrasimilis: castoro from the Latin for beaver,
cauda for tail, lutra for river otter and similis meaning
similar.
Weighing 1.1 to 1.7 pounds, about the size of a small female
platypus, Castorocauda is also the largest-known Jurassic early
mammal.
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| User: "R. Pierce Butler" |
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| Title: Re: Furry Remains Shake Up Jurassic Thinking |
25 Feb 2006 12:08:58 PM |
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wrote in
news:1140857876.254428.257900@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com:
They were eager beavers, off to an early start. O_-
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-sci-beaver25feb25,1,
6157261.story?coll=la-news-a_section
Now we wait for the godbots stupid enough to say this
"disproofs evilushun"!
Bob Dog
You won't have to wait long.
pierce
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