Your favourite "living fossils"?

[mynah]

I'm doing an article on the topic, which is more directed towards the popular and high school market than most of the stuff I write, and wondered which animals, plants and other almost unchanged from the dawn of time organisms to include in a frozen-in-time top 10.

 

I'd definitely include the coelacanth, which must have been the most amazing living transitional species find ever. The tuatara, as the last remaining sphenodont, is right up there. My favourite backyard living fossil is my tulip tree. (Have a closer look if you're in doubt - the flowers are midway between twigs and blossoms, and the fruit look remarkably like gymnosperm cones. Don't know what to make of the leaves, though...) On second thoughts, my ginkgo may be more deserving, but I don't know what to make of its leaves, either.

[Jet2]

Can Squid be one?

[Thunderbird]

Cycads

 

[Thunderbird]

The Marchantiophyta are a division of bryophyte plants commonly referred to as hepatics or liverworts. Like other bryophytes, they have a gametophyte-dominant life cycle, in which cells of the plant carry only a single set of genetic information

 

[Thunderbird]

Nautilus

 

[Thunderbird]

lungfish

 

[Thunderbird]

 

 

 

Bowfins are an order (Amiiformes) of primitive ray-finned fish. Only one species, the bowfin Amia calva, family Amiidae, exists today, although additional species in six families are known from Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Eocene fossils. These included the huge Leedsichthys, probably the biggest fish that ever existed. The bowfin and the gar are two of the freshwater fishes still extant that existed, almost unchanged from their current form, while the great dinosaurs roamed the earth

 

[Moontanman]

Birds! Birds are dinosaurs!

 

Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?

Ask your average paleontologist who is familiar with the phylogeny of vertebrates and they will probably tell you that yes, birds (avians) are dinosaurs. Using proper terminology, birds are avian dinosaurs; other dinosaurs are non-avian dinosaurs, and (strange as it may sound) birds are technically considered reptiles. Overly technical? Just semantics? Perhaps, but still good science. In fact, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of birds being the descendants of a maniraptoran dinosaur, probably something similar (but not identical) to a small dromaeosaur. What is this evidence?

 

Dinobuzz: Dinosaur-Bird Relationships

[Thunderbird]

Birds! Birds are dinosaurs!

 

 

 

Dinobuzz: Dinosaur-Bird Relationships

Thats the way I see birds.

[Moontanman]

Thats the way I see birds.

 

Any one who has been flogged by a rooster should be able to see the relationship quite well, the little bastards would be dangerous if they had teeth :)

[Thunderbird]

 

Hoatzin: Guyana's Prehistoric Throwback

The Hoatzin is a strange primitive bird. The Hoatzin's plump body and reddish-brown feathers may not appear antediluvian, but the bird's blood-red eyes set in patches of bright blue skin and unruly crest of long feathers are throwbacks to another time. Hoatzins are also born with two prehistoric claws protruding from their wings, a characteristic that lead many to believe that it's a direct link to the Archaeopteryx, the first known bird. Hoatzins are found along rivers and creeks in the Upper Demerara River-Berbice area in Guyana, and are easily seen because they often live in large groups and rarely stray far from their principal locals, probably due to the fact that they're poor fliers. Indeed, Guyana's national bird is such a bizarre species that it was put in its own order, the Opisthocomidae.

 

 

[Moontanman]

The entire domain of Archaea microbes.

[Thunderbird]

Any one who has been flogged by a rooster should be able to see the relationship quite well, the little bastards would be dangerous if they had teeth :)

Thats kinda how I realized they were indeed dinosarus.

One day I was moving chickens from one pen to another for my father inlaw. I picked a chicken up and just looked at it. I said to my father inlaw that I had just realized that I was holding a dinosaur. He gave me a Look and said

" Its a chicken". like I was being an idiot.

[freeztar]

Equisetophyta

 

[questor]

COCKROACHES! Cockroaches

Copyright 1998 by Edward Willett

Steven Spielberg missed a bet with his movie, Jurassic Park. He focused on the age of dinosaurs. If he really wanted to freak people out, he'd focus on a much earlier era, the Carboniferous Period: a.k.a. "The Age of Cockroaches."

 

Yes, cockroaches, those scuttling, light-fearing pests we've all encountered at one time or another, were once the predominant insect on the planet, and if their place in the evolutionary hierarchy has slipped a little, it shouldn't be taken as evidence that they are lacking in survival traits: they've hardly changed in the 320 million years since they first appeared on the planet. That's a pretty good indication that their design continues to be effective.

 

If they are that old, why aren't they walking upright with large cranial capacity? Did evolution pass them by?

[Moontanman]

COCKROACHES! Cockroaches

Copyright 1998 by Edward Willett

Steven Spielberg missed a bet with his movie, Jurassic Park. He focused on the age of dinosaurs. If he really wanted to freak people out, he'd focus on a much earlier era, the Carboniferous Period: a.k.a. "The Age of Cockroaches."

 

Yes, cockroaches, those scuttling, light-fearing pests we've all encountered at one time or another, were once the predominant insect on the planet, and if their place in the evolutionary hierarchy has slipped a little, it shouldn't be taken as evidence that they are lacking in survival traits: they've hardly changed in the 320 million years since they first appeared on the planet. That's a pretty good indication that their design continues to be effective.

 

If they are that old, why aren't they walking upright with large cranial capacity? Did evolution pass them by?

 

During that period they also had spiders the size of dogs and centipedes 10 feet long. Evolution has no goals only survival of the fittest. Roaches are not the only arthropods that have survived relatively unchanged since then.

Dragonflies

spiders

silverfish

millipedes

centipedes

scorpions

isopods

The list is quite long

[Eclogite]

We should be careful not to presume superficial phenotypic similarities are tantamount to genotypic near identity.:confused: