#animal evolution

No, but if you think of it, insects evolved from crustaceans, so why shouldn't they live in the ocean? Crustaceans trace back roughly 511 million years, with insects arriving 420-400 mya. Once they came on the scene, they almost immediately abandoned the water for land. Their anatomy chemistry is oxygen-hungry, and air contains 21% oxygen; seawater only 1% by volume. Crustaceans avoid this problem by forming gills, like fish, & oxygen diffuses across their gills, delivering needed oxygen. CO₂ diffuses out into the water & is carried away. The insect respiratory system is built for air, not water. Insects coevolved with plants, especially flowering plants, which shaped their feeding, reproduction & diversification. Meanwhile, the ocean remained dominated by crustaceans that were already perfectly adapted to marine life.

"In a new study, University of New South Wales Professor Mike Archer and colleagues re-examined the fossilized tibia (lower leg bone) of a now-extinct, giant sthenurine kangaroo. Found in Mammoth Cave in southwestern Australia around the time of the First World War, the bone was later determined to be hard evidence showing that Indigenous Australians hunted megafauna. Professor Archer was involved in the 1980 study that found a distinctive cut in the fossilized bone was evidence of butchery. But he now happily concedes this original finding was wrong."

“As a scientist, it’s not just my job but my responsibility to update the record when new evidence comes to light,” Professor Archer said.

“Back in 1980, we interpreted the cut as evidence of butchery because that was the best conclusion we could draw with the tools available at the time.”

“Thanks to advances in technology, we can now see that our original interpretation was wrong.”

“When the bones were analyzed from the 1960s onwards, there was much debate about whether or not First Peoples lived compatibly with Australia’s prehistoric megafauna or whether they were the cause of the extinction of these megafaunal animals.”

“Many saw the incision in the bone as being made by humans with tools — and that it finally showed that the extinction of megafauna and arrival of humans about 65,000 years ago was no coincidence.”

“For decades, the Mammoth Cave bone was a ‘smoking gun’ for the idea that Australia’s First Peoples hunted megafauna, but with that evidence now overturned, the debate about what caused the extinction of these giant animals is wide open again, and the role of humans is less clear than ever.”

To re-analyze the same sthenurine leg bone with the incision, Professor Archer and co-authors used high-tech, 3D-scanning to look inside the bone without damaging it.

They also used updated radiometric dating technology to try to work out how old the bone and the cut really were and detailed microscopic analysis of the cut surfaces.

Their analyses revealed the cut was made after the bone had dried out and had developed shrinkage cracks — meaning it was likely already fossilized when the incision occurred.

The paleontologists also analyzed a fossil tooth ‘charm’ given by a Worora Nations man at Mowanjum Mission to Kim Akerman, an archaeologist working with First Nations people in the Kimberley in the 1960s.

The tooth belonged to Zygomaturus trilobus, a type of giant marsupial, distantly related to wombats, that was part of Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna."

"“This implies a cultural appreciation or symbolic use of fossils long before European science did.”

“You could say that First Peoples may have been the continent’s — and possibly the world’s — first paleontologists.”

The researchers do not completely rule out the possibility that First Peoples hunted Australia’s megafauna.

But without hard evidence, it’s not possible to definitively say Indigenous Australians were responsible for its extinction."

I wonder how many species have been forever lost to time only because they never fossilized or left behind and traces of their existence.

Who knows what incredible, terrifying, or seemingly alien forms of life once called this planet home, that we'll never know once existed?

Ancient life is incredible. It makes me sad to know that so many species of flora and fauna and everything in between will never be known. Things so odd they seem straight out of movies.

Some warm-blooded animals are experiencing shifts in their body shapes, likely as a response to the pressures of climate change, according to a new review of existing research.

Animals are getting larger beaks, legs and ears that allow them to better regulate their body temperatures as the planet gets hotter, with birds particularly affected, said Sara Ryding, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia and one of the authors of the research that published on Tuesday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The biggest shifts in appendage size in the more than 30 animals they looked at in the review were among some Australian parrot species, which saw their beak size increase by 4% to 10% on average since 1871.

FINALLY!! Here it is! The fanfic cover for Mimi

I love to make covers for fanfics, not everyone commissions this kind of things, so it makes me happy that some people really appreciate my work in this way ;;;