The polar bear and hippopotamus are for the first time listed as species threatened with extinction by the world's biodiversity agency.

[Fontaine]

Maybe there isn't, maybe there is.
Just saying that when we destroy today's specie knows as ''the crodile'' for example which also was alive in a more primitive form million and millions of years as ''the archosaurs?'' and this specie basicly survived every disaster as far as we know it (maybe there was never a really big astroid hit, this is mostly a theory) but maybe (maybe!) due humans it's get exterminated forever which never happened in all those millions of years.

So maybe the hippo was also in a more primative form millions and millions of years ago and even lived with the archosaurs/old crocs back then.
I am saying basicly that when there is no more '''hippo'' arround it could be pretty earthshocking and not seen before in all those millions of years before.

[Clipperjay]

I think Fon means that the elephants are still here even though a direct ancestor to the Mammoth?

For example the two types of classification of fossils found are no debated as one classification of Homo sapiens and the Neandertals.
Homo heidelbergensis and Homo Neanderthalensis

Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus) and Peking Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) were originally assigned not only to different species, but different genera from Homo sapiens. Scientists such as Boule who considered them in the same genus but not the same species would sink Sinanthropus as a genus and call Peking Man Pithecanthropus pekinensis. Most scientists soon decided they were in the same species, so the Peking Man specimens were reassigned to P. erectus because that name had priority over S. pekinensis. Later, when it was decided that P. erectus was in the same genus as Homo sapiens, the genus name Pithecanthropus was sunk and the specific name erectus was kept, so the species became Homo erectus.
Recent claims of genetic and anatomical differences between modern humans and Neandertals have added support to a species status for Homo neanderthalensis. (Krings et al. 1997; Hublin et al. 1996; Tattersall and Schwartz 1996)

The debate still goes on as to the anatomical differences that classifcation is based upon.
so with that in a million years or so we as a spices could die out, and a new form could take shape, but the same building block are there in terms of genes.


But in my humble opinion your all Homo's Erectus  

[Fontaine]

Yes, without the mammouth no eliphant. So the mammouth may died out but if you look closer it's not really true and the mammouth had an anchaster aswell and may have lived in some form as some kind of dinosaur??

So when no more eliphant today there won't come an eliphant tomorrow and millions of years ''evolution'' gone in a blink!

[Reflex]

That isn't technically true.  Related species are not necessarily linear.  For instance, Neandertal's are most likely NOT ancestors of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, just a different branch on the tree(there is actually some new doubt being raised about Neandertal's specifically however).  There are many branches of humans that died out without anyone decending from them.  The same is true of other species.  We don't necessarily know where elephants came from, just because they look similiar to Mammoths does not mean that is their direct ancestor.

A good comparison is dolphins.  They would appear to have come from some form of fish, however we now know that they were originally a land animal and are most closely related to the cow.  There is no overt physical reason to believe this, but with DNA and fossil evidence we can demonstrate it today.

You may be suprised what is related to a hippo and what it decended from.  It dosen't necessarily look or function at all like the hippo...

[Babar]

You talking about the whale being the closest relative of the hippo?

[Fontaine]

To be honest it is 1 big guessbook without really hard proof or facts.

It's just my personal belief that things all come together.. so when there was the mammouth you had the sabretooth tiger and today the ''normal'' tiger and the ''normal'' eliphant and not 1 specie out of time!

It doesn't seem species really supress others but mostly (if not always!) they seem to evolve hand in hand together.

It's not really we suparssed ''other animals'' in biological form/quality its just that we have the power to change things as we like and even have power over other animals. But then again I do believe in a creator..and that I can't proof.

[sf37]

I agree that the diversity of species will be disrupted with extinctions occurring, but there is nothing to say that it won't return with time.  It always has done so in the past.  

Reflex is right on the point.  If you think about it, wooly mammoths and elephants cannot be a direct lineage as extinction of the former would prevent the latter from existing.  Elephants are living proof that this cannot be so.  It is more likely that they have evolved to occupy very different regions - woolly being in colder climes, elephants in warmer.  

I really don't want to suggest that extinction now is not a bad thing... but this will not be a total loss if humans allow other species to survive around them.  I think the best example is the current dominance of mammals on this planet - theory goes that after the the extinction of the dinosaurs, the only mammals able to survive were very small, nocturnal mammals much like some current-day rodents.  From those few, we, amongst so many others have evolved.

[Clipperjay]

- Mammoth was more closely related to Asian elephant than African elephant -
Lets look closer and get scientfic on a bit of reasarch!

This sequence was compared with the complete mitochondrial DNA of eight Afrotherian mammals; African and Asian elephants, dugong, hyrax, aardvark, elephant shrew, golden mole and tenrec, and one Xenarthran mammal, armagillo. The Bayesian, maximum likelihood (ML) and neighbor joining (NJ) phylogenetic analysis based on the 3386 amino acid sequences (12 mitochondrial proteins), 1744 bp of mitochondrial DNA sequences (12S + 16S rRNA), and 246 nuclear gene sequences (concatenated sequence of vWF,A2AB and IRBP gene flagments) produced the same topology for the Elephantid clade and revealed a sister group relationship of mammoth and Asian elephants with very high Bayesian posterior probability (98-100%) and high bootstrap support (56-99%). Our large molecular data confirmed at the first time in the molecular phylogeny that the mammoth was more closely related to the Asian elephant than the African elephant.

http://www.expo2005.or.jp/en/mammoth/050617_dna.html

[sf37]

I think this bit is of that link is most relevant here:

[Tuan Huynh]

I say we eat em all!

[Fontaine]

Wasn't there an Asian Mammoth and an African Mammoth? ( I really don't know).
Perhaps they examined an Asian Mammoth so yes it was more  closely related to the Asian elephant?

[Fontaine]

I say we eat em all!

Well there are still cannibals..
As you can see they are hunting Tuan's.

[Reflex]

Wasn't there an Asian Mammoth and an African Mammoth? ( I really don't know).
Perhaps they examined an Asian Mammoth so yes it was more  closely related to the Asian elephant?

The thing is, we DO know, due to our ability to decode DNA we can tell exactly how different species are related.  Wooley Mammoth's were cousins of elephants, not ancestors.  Big difference.  Even if Mammoth's had never existed elephants as we know them today WOULD have come into being...

[Fontaine]

Wasn't there an Asian Mammoth and an African Mammoth? ( I really don't know).
Perhaps they examined an Asian Mammoth so yes it was more  closely related to the Asian elephant?

The thing is, we DO know, due to our ability to decode DNA we can tell exactly how different species are related.  Wooley Mammoth's were cousins of elephants, not ancestors.  Big difference.  Even if Mammoth's had never existed elephants as we know them today WOULD have come into being...

Wooley Mammoths where just Mammoths but with more wool since of the cold.
I don't really believe that part ''even if there where no (wooly)Mammoths'' there still would have been eliphants today.

Exactly is a big word! Escpecially we often don't got the whole puzzle. We got fragements of the puzzle and we try to find some truth in that but it's only true untill they find a new part of the puzzle or they have seen that they placed a puzzle on the wrong place after 50 years.

They make more errors in this field of science then any other but we eat it as junkfood.

An ICEbear is relative simple with just white hair and I am sure there are still bears when there is no IceBear anymore but it's get really troublesome where there are no more bears.
There are just not much different kind of hippo's so when no more hippo I really don't believe they will return someday.

[Reflex]

Wooley Mammoths where just Mammoths but with more wool since of the cold.
I don’t really believe that part ‘’even if there where no (wooly)Mammoths’’ there still would have been eliphants today.

If your cousin was not alive today does that mean that you also would not be alive?  That is the relationship between elephants and mammoths.  They are not decendants of each other, they are relatives.  Evolution is not a linear path, it is a tree with multiple branches.  The branches that are best adapted to the environment survive while the others die out.

Exactly is a big word! Escpecially we often don’t got the whole puzzle. We got fragements of the puzzle and we try to find some truth in that but it’s only true untill they find a new part of the puzzle or they have seen that they placed a puzzle on the wrong place after 50 years.

Finding new pieces to the puzzle rarely invalidates earlier work, it merely places it in a larger context.  Most so-called 'errors' or corrections in science do not make major changes to a theory, they only clarify it, and most of the time they strengthen the theory when found since they likely were making another area of the theory implausible.  Its like putting a puzzle together and putting and putting a piece in the wrong location.  When you find where it is supposed to go it does not mean that the puzzle was broken in the first place, it instead makes the picture clearer and often leads to several other pieces fitting where you could not find their location beforehand due to the wrong piece.

They make more errors in this field of science then any other but we eat it as junkfood.

Blatently incorrect.  Geology and anthropology are actually some of the least error prone sciences out there because they are dealing with hard facts.  By contrast, fields like quantum mechanics and string theory are extremely error prone since the theories put forward are untestable(in fact many scientists have difficulty calling them even scientific for that very reason), but the media frequently eats up the latest junk science to come out of string theory and presents it as fact.

There are just not much different kind of hippo’s so when no more hippo I really don’t believe they will return someday.

In their exact current form likely not, although its not impossible.  As Babar pointed out though, the species won't really die, they are related to whales which are still alive and can evolve a land-dwelling relative at some point in the future...

[Fontaine]

In their exact current form likely not, although its not impossible.  As Babar pointed out though, the species won't really die, they are related to whales which are still alive and can evolve a land-dwelling relative at some point in the future...

Escpecially such parts of ''hipos are related to whales'' I take that just as information and not evidence or truth at al, just someone came up with that and sells it to other scientists then those other scientists will agree or dismiss it but often are wrong anyways.

And it would be reverse evolution if they would suddenly exit the ocean as a very evolved specie known as the whale and go on land again and start the whole tiresome process again.
The whale is also in danger from getting exterminated (at least allot of whale species).

I also read that they think wolves entered the water and became whales!

Perhaps we should look at the human specie.
When there are no more black humans does it matter much? should we care? If no more yellow? should we care then?
If no more white, should we care then? At which point should we and at what point does the human specie get in danger?

[sf37]

OK, here is the link to the scientific data regarding whales and hippos:

http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=15677331

PNAS is a well respected scientific journal, and I consider myself as one of the "they" that you mention - I am currently finishing my training as a research scientist.  On what do you base these comments?  There will always be disagreements between scientists, but only regarding theories, not regarding facts.  

You have to appreciate that DNA analysis is molecular biology, a field that applies to so many research scientists and cannot easily be refuted.  Certainly not on the basis that a 'whale and a hippo look so different, it just can't be possible' kind of way.  This would be the 'acid-test' that sets the theory in concrete.

There is no such thing as reverse evolution.  Humans can reverse engineer something, but evolution is natural selection - if something is favoured, then it will be selected.

[Clipperjay]

I say we eat em all!

With chips Tuan and ketchup! :vampire:

[sf37]

I say we eat em all!

With chips Tuan and ketchup! :vampire:

Hmm, see, neither hippos nor polar bears are really common in the UK or USA... and they both look kinda fatty.... :lol:

[Fontaine]

OK, here is the link to the scientific data regarding whales and hippos:

http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=15677331

PNAS is a well respected scientific journal, and I consider myself as one of the "they" that you mention - I am currently finishing my training as a research scientist.  On what do you base these comments?  There will always be disagreements between scientists, but only regarding theories, not regarding facts.  You have to appreciate that DNA analysis is molecular biology, a field that applies to so many research scientists and cannot easily be refuted.  Certainly not on the basis that a 'whale and a hippo look so different, it just can't be possible' kind of way.

There is no such thing as reverse evolution.  Humans can reverse engineer something, but evolution is natural selection - if something is favoured, then it will be selected.

Ok it could be very well be so. It's just hard to swallow.

I must say these 2 eyes do look familiar. I have an excellent eye for detail!! so I just googled it.

[Fontaine]

Well I hope we can be proud though when we did exterminated the hippo!

As proud as these guys... real hunters! And since it doesn't really matter if they are gone because remember they are still swimming in the oceans anyways.

[sf37]

The original link only said that they are *threatened* with extinction (for the first time), though.  I have seen a few of each in zoos, so I know they've not totally gone just yet!

[Fontaine]

The original link only said that they are *threatened* with extinction (for the first time), though.  I have seen a few of each in zoos, so I know they've not totally gone just yet!

Ok but when it's treatened it's in danger of doing so and when they are only in zoos left they have officially died out. We could try to put them back... so not all hope is lost but it would be a very hard job in succeeding so, although not impossible but hard yes.

[Reflex]

No one here is advocating the intentional destruction of the hippo.  We are merely pointing out that species extinction is a natural event that happens frequently throughout history.  And that when it does happen it does NOT remove the genes of that species from the gene pool, they continue on through their relatives and in fact the positive traits are likely to appear in other creatures down the line.

As for your distrust of science, realize that were it not for science, you would not be able to communicate with us in this fashion.  Virtually everything you do on a day to day basis is thanks to the scientific method which you are denigrating with your statements regarding scientists and facts.  Take a shower?  Thank scientists for the concepts for indoor plumbing.  Eat food?  Thank scientists for modern agriculture.  Walk outside and breathe the relatively clean air?  Thank scientists for the technology that creates pollution controls.  Enjoy living in your home?  Science went into the architecture of its design.  Chances are everything you do at work is based in science as well.  The fact that you live past the age of 30 is due to science.

Science has been right *far* more than its been wrong.  And even when it has been wrong it has been a learning experience that has further strengthened science as a whole.

[Xookliba]

Escpecially such parts of ''hipos are related to whales'' I take that just as information and not evidence or truth at al, just someone came up with that and sells it to other scientists then those other scientists will agree or dismiss it but often are wrong anyways.

Hmmmm... statements like this make me realize how far we yet have to go.  Even if this is considered the "DNA age."

Did you say this for effect, or do you really believe this?