Badger3k
Posts: 861 Joined: Mar. 2008
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Quote (Robert Byers @ Feb. 01 2010,04:05) | Quote (Badger3k @ Jan. 28 2010,02:10) | Quote (Robert Byers @ Jan. 28 2010,00:14) | I saw on another forum that there is this fantastic moving picture video of the marsupial wolf. Youtube. I don't know how to get it but every poster interested or confident enough should see it. its just a few minutes long. One should watch it several times. It is of one of the last marsupial dogs that ever existed. Watch with a open mind. Watch how it walks and lays down and sits upright and scratches and chews something. Remember they say it howled at night. I say that this creature is a doggie. It is not a flexible possum or short kangaroo. It is surely and clearly the first conclusion that it is exactly what its same shaped fellows in other countries are. A canine with a pouch. Yes a few minor differences in sloping back/mouth etc. Yet these fit fine in the great diversity of dog types in the world or even in domestic dogs. (I believe dogs and bears are the same thing but thats beside the point)
I say likewise would a marsupial cat of looked just like our cats. These are not superficial physical bodies and superficial motions of bodies like other creatures on earth because of convergent evolution. It has been a great error of classification, done by very few people, to have seen marsupials as a group unrelated to placentals . They are the same creatures as placentals, according to each type, and simply adapted a marsupial mode of reproduction under some influence and by innate triggers and a wee bit more adaptions of this and that.
This explains the migration of marsupials from a common origin off the biblical ark by showing marsupialism was a last act of a new colonizer. This happened also in south America by either migration from the north or just adaption in South america. So these marsupials are no more related to Australian marsupials then any other placentals anywhere.
I would be interested in what the serious posters here, who have been commenting on this, think and see when watching this marsupial pooch.
Pictures can say better then words sometimes. |
What would you expect it to act like? Have you ever watched any nature films - Wild America, Wild Kingdom ... Walt Disney films? Anything?
Have you ever studied animal behavior? Seen any similarities in even widely divergent species? A lot of the behaviors are inherited - of course they would be similar. There are only so many varieties of behavior that are possible, as well. We also love to look at similarities.
Of course, if you really had an open mind you'd realize that your desire for them to be the same (a dog with a pouch) is clearly making you see what you want. When I see that clip, and I've seen it hundreds of times, I see a pack animal that is missing it's pack. It's a behavior that you can see in hundreds of different animals. It's that pesky "common ancestry" - the relationships that reveal we are all related. We know marsupials are related to us, through a common ancestor millions of years ago, a fact that anatomy and genetics (as well as radiocarbon and radioactive dating, geology and paleontology) shows us. It's only a few people who want to ignore a vast body of evidence to preserve their child-like belief in the scribblings of some very ignorant bronze and iron-age people.
Why do you persist in looking at the surface, and ignoring all the evidence presented against you. There are questions that I and others have asked, and you have ignored them, simply repeating your assertions as if they were true. You persist in doing that now.
We've presented skeletal evidence that completely contradicts your claim that marsupial lions look like placental felines, yet you persist in saying they would look the same. They don't. It's a fact. You do know what a fact is, don't you? A fact is not just what supports your religious beliefs, but something that often contradicts your religious beliefs, especially if what you believe is so pathetic as your descendant of the Atrahasis legend of Sumeria.
How about native placentals in Australia? Why did they not need to breed rapidly and so become marsupials? Why was it only a select few? If marsupial lions and lions are related, they should possess the same genetics, and we should be able, with genetic engineering, to activate the marsupial genes and make us a marsupial lion from an african one, right? Any bets on whether this is really possible (hey, stop laughing back there, I can hear you)?
Pictures can indeed "say better then (sic) words sometimes" - but intelligence, thinking, and evidence are much better all the time. Try it for once.
However, why not try to watch a video of chimpanzees sometime, keeping a real open mind, and leave your dogma on the shelf. You might see the thousands of similarities in their behavior with our own. You'd see the close relationship of our two species. Maybe pictures are worth a thousand words.
more, just because they are interesting: bonobo tool use NSFW - Bonobo Sex Self-Recognition in apes
(try looking up Jane Goodall - In The Shadow of Man was one of the first books I bought with my own money, and I still have it. Franz van der Waal - his Inner Ape, IIRC, was very good. - I'd post a link to my scientific papers I've collected, but after a hard drive crash, I've got to have my program relearn all of them, and that is taking a lot of time, and I'm not sure of the legality of posting papers I've downloaded through my school, so maybe later)
Sorry if this is disjointed, but after a long day dealing with students and parents, coming home to the same broken record...I'll just take a page from python "My Brain Hurts!" |
I don't mean its pack behaivor. I mean the way it moves about is a great visual for why one and myself should conclude or start a careful investigation into ,that this is a wolf like any wolf anywhere. It has to one's vision all the visual aspects of form and motion of a canine. Not the form and motion of possums or wallabys with some difference in the snout.
Likewise in looking at this marsupial wolf one can see the thousands of points of anatomy in order to see such sameness of form that therefore calls for convergent evolution concepts to explain the remarable likeness.
The minor points of difference are so little as either to be invisable in the pictures here or easily dismissed as a product of a different area.
Yes there is more slope to the back or wider mouth but this is not to confuse one about heritage. its not niche that made this critter like a dog but niche that made it marsupial and a few other collective adaptations. Seeing this creature with a open mind would surely suggest at least a option that clasification systems have been incompetent on these matters. I say its a common theme in the fossil record. They have cats galore from unrelated orders just like the case here.
I see a typical wolf of the world. I'm sure the marsupial lion would look likewise like a regular lion in form and motion |
So, basically, you agree with me that chimpanzees and humans are related, right? They look and act the same in so many ways, that there must be very few differences, right?
What about my other questions - the ones on native placentals in Australia, perhaps? Heck, what about all the other questions in this thread you've ignored?
-------------- "Just think if every species had a different genetic code We would have to eat other humans to survive.." : Joe G
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