by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Tuesday September 15, 2009 @12:17AM (#29422425)
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards, poisonous insects, deadly spiders, and territorial (and vicious) birds... you'd be perfectly safe.
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards, poisonous insects, deadly spiders, and territorial (and vicious) birds... you'd be perfectly safe.
Last I checked we only had man eating birds, and the odd man eating Maori.
Tough? You're probably cooking them too fast. Have you tried preparing one sous-vide ?
Close. Slow cooked in a wet sand pit filled with hot rocks and covered with palm leaves is the regional cooking method. Kind of like a clam bake, without the clams.
Last I checked we only had man eating birds, and the odd man eating Maori.
Apparently, you also have shotgun-wielding guys in dresses that like desecrating churches,
like this guy [youtube.com]. On a related note, this story makes me wonder if there has ever been any evidence for the Naga or the Garuda (sans mythology, of course).
. . . well I'm hoping the sheep eating lizards found more than just evidence of 'land animals' else they would soon become 'fuck, where's the sheep?' lizards. Admittedly they sound dangerous too . . .
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Tuesday September 15, 2009 @03:06AM (#29423183)
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards, poisonous insects, deadly spiders, and territorial (and vicious) birds... you'd be perfectly safe.
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider (the Katipo [wikipedia.org]) that's rare, endangered, and found only on coastlands (eg. not inland). The next worse thing (probably a whitetail spider [wikipedia.org]) merely makes you nauseous, and is not deadly.
Because of the tectonic plate movement New Zealand drifted off before animals and before evolution favoured overtly vicious creatures, let alone poisonous creatures.
New Zealand was a land full of birds before humans arrived in about 1000 AD, bringing rats and other animals.
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
Not wise to eat poisonous spiders. Venomous ones, now that could be another matter...
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
That's an interesting assertion. How are you defining native? And treaty? (I'm assuming that 'vicious pommy bastard tribe' refers to us inhabitants of the sceptred isle) Surely Britain must have had a number of treaties with Indian principalities (although I suppose that would have been the East India Company rather than the British state). I thought ho
Well, to be explicit, I'm a Cascadian Culturalist. And a Catholic Culturalist. In that I see in those two meta cultures something beyond normal humanity.
But that doesn't excuse the way Northern Europeans have done colonialism- over and over and over.....
That's because the Pommies almost got their butts handed to them on a silver platter at the Battle of Gate Pa. That's when the Pommies found out that the Pa is a little more resilient than they first thought.
Not only that, I think the Pommies were scared by the fact they ate an entire race of people called the Morioris. I hear pasty white guys taste like chicken.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Tuesday September 15, 2009 @12:55AM (#29422615)
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
But, the Haast Eagle was unconfirmed before this? I've been brought up and it's always been a fact to me.
The actual news here is that they co-existed with the Maori - it was previously thought they had died out before the Maori arrived. The existence of the Haast's Eagle was well known and there exist Moa bones with massive gouges from being attacked by these Eagles.
If by co-exist you mean EAT THEM, then yes, there was a lot of co-existence.
That's usually what happens when animals co-exist. Think about it -- if they weren't co-existing, how would they have any opportunity to eat each other?
So we knew they existed and we knew that the Maori told stories of and painted pictures of something remarkably similar yet we decided that the Maori knew about it because of all the Maori archeologists? I don't get why it would just be assumed that the stories and paintings were about snuffleupagus
You know, those legends would be easily explained if "dragons" turned out to be some sort of fire-breathing dinosaur, but we're not allowed to entertain notions of dinosaurs coexisting with humans in the time-line of biological evolution.
That's because the few dinosaurs that survived the Asteroid Extinction evolved into warm-blooded feathered lizards... and by the time homo erectus arose, those feather lizards had become birds.
It is well established that dragons were never something that people actually saw... they were imagined monsters. European written and oral tradition simply does not contain any credible tales of human-dragon interaction, and provides ample evidence that no such thing ever happened.
we're not allowed to entertain notions of dinosaurs coexisting with humans in the time-line of biological evolution.
You can entertain any notion you want. Don't expect anyone to consider your ideas anything more than entertainment until there's some evidence.
As far as the evolutionary time line, it's not a matter of "you're not allowed" so much as "there's a gap of hundreds of millions of years between the youngest known (non-bird) dinosaur fossil and the earliest known primate fossil." Call me when you find a dinosaur fossil from 100k years ago. Until then, I think I'll refrain from subscribing to your newsletter.
I'm sure that the "fire breathing" stories are extreme exaggerations. To this day there are animals which excrete peroxides and other substances which when mixed (when they hit the prey, usually small bugs) get really hot (to boiling temperatures) and/or become caustic. There is definitely a beetle still living today which does this (bombadier beetle, IIRC?) and there may be a couple of lizards with this kind of mechanism.
Could that have been an alligator-sized lizard, or maybe something slightly larger? If
Actually, the description in the Catholic Old Testament book "Bel and the Dragon" didn't breathe fire, but did have rather bad breath; I read an article once that compared it favorably to a Nile Crocodile.
It wouldn't be the first time a "long-extinct" creature had been discovered to be not quite so long-extinct as we'd thought.
Have any of these been ones that allegedly terrorized the populace only a few hundred years ago? I'd think something as conspicuous as a dragon would be easier to find evidence for. I thought most of the creatures that were thought to be extinct but weren't tended to have survived somewhere that people didn't frequent, rather than say mainland England.
I had in mind a creature which was slightly less ferocious, and significantly less noticeable, which is probably why it wasn't hunted to extinction.
But that is still a fire-breathing dinosaur in modern times that explains middle-ages dragon myths. A combination of something that there is no evidence of having existed in the last hundred million years, and something that there is no evidence of having existed ever. Hell, as long as this is still strictly in your mind, why not add in that it can turn invisi
European might not- but Jewish Greek Egyptian writings even included it in scripture (Bel and the Dragon, a kind of addendum to the Book of Daniel in which an encounter with a dragon is indeed described; one could also point out that a similar encounter is attributed to Alexander the Great). Of course, their dragon didn't have wings, and didn't breathe fire, just had bad breath. It was probably a crocodile.
What about the horseshoe crab? Aren't there fossil examples of that from the Paleozoic Era, along with other trilobites? And what about the crocodilian arm of the Archosaur family, of which there are several hundred individual species alive today?
What about them? So there are ancient creatures that survive in some form today. Sharks are another example. None of those are dinosaurs, and also unlike dinosaurs there is ample evidence of their survival into modern times.
The Archosaur family, having evolved during the Triassic period, are considered dinosaurs, and half of them are land based without feathers. Trilobites, not so much- they're more related to scorpions and other insects than lizards.
Archosaurs includes dinosaurs and crocodilians, but crocodilians are not dinosaurs. Trilobites aren't even close to dinosaurs.:P
But be that as it may, I'm still not seeing your point. Crocodiles are alive today, so maybe some non-avian dinosaurs are too, but we just haven't found them yet? What? Throw me a bone here.
Which is even farther from dinosaurs than the example of crocodilians given by the other poster.
Seriously, are you trying to show that there are creatures who date back hundreds of millions of years? So what? I know it's possible for a species to have survived that long, it's just that so far as we know dinosaurs aren't among them. Excepting birds of course.
Or is it just that this ancient reptile is from NZ?:)
A combination of something that there is no evidence of having existed in the last hundred million years, and something that there is no evidence of having existed ever.
Careful now. If you start using arguments like that, I might ask you for evidence that "missing links" ever existed. We know they did, right?
Careful now. If you start using arguments like that, I might ask you for evidence that "missing links" ever existed. We know they did, right?
We predicted missing links, and absolutely yes we've found missing links, for an absolutely astounding number of cases in the last ~150 years. Even as the term "missing link" changes to mean the link between the last "missing link" subsequently found, and whatever it was supposed to be linking. Again and again. The gaps in the fossil record are ever-shrinking, and p
Fire breathing isn't hard to explain. Fish control their depth using a swim bladder, which contains air (providing buoyancy) and is squeezed to increase the fish's density. A few species of fish generate electricity for communication and attack. If you pass electricity through salt water, you can separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. A fish that stored hydrogen in its swim bladder, instead of air, would be able to fly, using its flippers for directional control, rather than lift (although it would need
I see crocodiles as a subspecies of dinosaur- given when they evolved as a definition of "dinosaur"- during the mid Triassic, much earlier than the Cretaceous era. Thus they are an example of a non-avian dinosaur species that survived the Cretaceous -Tertiary extinction event.
Biologists don't. They consider them a relative of dinosaurs, but they are different for valid biological and phylogenic reasons. Dinosaurs and crocodilians are separate branches of archosaurs. Look it up.
given when they evolved as a definition of "dinosaur"- during the mid Triassic, much earlier than the Cretaceous era.
That's a pretty bad definition. Lots of things, including even more distant reptile relatives of dinosaurs such as Icthyosaurs, evolved during
I don't get why it would just be assumed that the stories and paintings were about snuffleupagus
Because, as everyone knows, the snuffleupagus co-existed not only with man, but also with the elmo. If the snuffleupagus tried to eat a human being, the elmo would be very angry with them. One of them might even go so far as to write a song about them.
From TFA, the actual news is that the Haast's eagle had a body structure that could support predation, rather than just scavenging, as was previously thought. Since humans are blamed for their extinction, you've got yourself a bit of a chicken/egg situation on non-co-existence.
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
The native bat is not flightless. It does a funny scamper thing along the ground but this does not make it flightless.
But, the Haast Eagle was unconfirmed before this? I've been brought up and it's always been a fact to me.
Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.
When the first polynesian settlers showed up they would have climbed out of their Waka http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/waka-canoes [teara.govt.nz] and on to the lunch menu.
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.
A human much easier meal than a moa? The first humans before they knew about Haast eagle maybe, then the occasional child or woman, and then it was over for the easy meals, more likely encounter was full grown Maori males looking for a vengence and the high status of coming back in the tribe with Haast eagle beak, talons and feathers...
Imho it was the occasional human meal was what caused the extinction of Haast eagle, probably more than overhunting of the Moas: No easy meal after the first few unaware victims, and systematic destruction of nests, youngs and preying adults afterwards...just like all other predators meeting the homo sapiens and having the bad idea (well, more the natural idea not yet eradicated by darwinian evolution) of thinking "this naked monkey looks like easy meal".
And not only eat the good old homo sapiens, but also eating any of his food stock would turn a bad idea for long term survival: RIP wolves, american lions, lynx,...: a top predator sharing territory with a sufficiently dense human population is doomed.
Australasian fauna is one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design that I can imagine. Although, of course, a few of the plants God created on third day could possibly explain His behaviour on days four to six. Maybe the seventh day also included getting the munchies as well as resting...
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
I think the usual claim is no mammals except for bats. There were other animals that you didn't mention, such as worms and centipedes.
so... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
So it wasn't the dingo, after all.
No dingos in NZ.
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Of course not! Not any more -- did you see the size of those Dingo eating birds?
Re:so... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards, poisonous insects, deadly spiders, and territorial (and vicious) birds... you'd be perfectly safe.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards, poisonous insects, deadly spiders, and territorial (and vicious) birds... you'd be perfectly safe.
Last I checked we only had man eating birds, and the odd man eating Maori.
Yup.. (Score:5, Funny)
Yup,...it'd be a pretty Odd man that eats a Maori. Pretty tough buggers those. :-) A bit of a step up from Pit Bull I tell you!
Re:Yup.. (Score:5, Funny)
Yup,...it'd be a pretty Odd man that eats a Maori. Pretty tough buggers those.
Tough? You're probably cooking them too fast. Have you tried preparing one sous-vide ?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Tough? You're probably cooking them too fast. Have you tried preparing one sous-vide ?
Close. Slow cooked in a wet sand pit filled with hot rocks and covered with palm leaves is the regional cooking method. Kind of like a clam bake, without the clams.
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the odd man eating Maori.
So what would even men eat?
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Apparently, you also have shotgun-wielding guys in dresses that like desecrating churches, like this guy [youtube.com]. On a related note, this story makes me wonder if there has ever been any evidence for the Naga or the Garuda (sans mythology, of course).
no evidence of land animals? (Score:4, Funny)
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards . . .
. . . well I'm hoping the sheep eating lizards found more than just evidence of 'land animals' else they would soon become 'fuck, where's the sheep?' lizards. Admittedly they sound dangerous too . . .
Re:no evidence of land animals? (Score:5, Funny)
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Hell, I can't breath ***chest explodes***
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Sorry, wrong URL. You're looking for http://www.adultsheepfinder.co.nz/ [adultsheepfinder.co.nz]
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Well, I don't know about NZ, but I have doubts about their next door neighbors. Tie me kangaroo down, sport, indeed.
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Re:so... (Score:4, Informative)
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider (the Katipo [wikipedia.org]) that's rare, endangered, and found only on coastlands (eg. not inland). The next worse thing (probably a whitetail spider [wikipedia.org]) merely makes you nauseous, and is not deadly.
Because of the tectonic plate movement New Zealand drifted off before animals and before evolution favoured overtly vicious creatures, let alone poisonous creatures.
New Zealand was a land full of birds before humans arrived in about 1000 AD, bringing rats and other animals.
Re:so... (Score:5, Funny)
Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
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Deadly spiders? New Zealand has no snakes and only one species of poisonous spider
That's because the Maori's ate them all. Seriously, the bloody Maori's are the only native race to ever get a treaty from the vicious pommy bastard tribe!
Not wise to eat poisonous spiders. Venomous ones, now that could be another matter...
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Whoosh.
X-Mod-Mindfuck: that's the sound of a swinging pendant, not a low flying joke
Re: (Score:2)
That's an interesting assertion. How are you defining native? And treaty? (I'm assuming that 'vicious pommy bastard tribe' refers to us inhabitants of the sceptred isle) Surely Britain must have had a number of treaties with Indian principalities (although I suppose that would have been the East India Company rather than the British state). I thought ho
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I think he meant a treaty that actually survived more than a few weeks.
You've got to admit, among native tribal peoples, we whites descended from Englishmen and Northern Europeans have a horrible reputation for lying.
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Well, to be explicit, I'm a Cascadian Culturalist. And a Catholic Culturalist. In that I see in those two meta cultures something beyond normal humanity.
But that doesn't excuse the way Northern Europeans have done colonialism- over and over and over .....
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Re: (Score:1)
Re:so... (Score:5, Interesting)
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
But, the Haast Eagle was unconfirmed before this? I've been brought up and it's always been a fact to me.
Re:so... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:so... (Score:5, Funny)
"The actual news here is that they co-existed with the Maori"
If by co-exist you mean EAT THEM, then yes, there was a lot of co-existence.
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I think eating implies coexistence, although the converse is not necessarily true.
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If by co-exist you mean EAT THEM, then yes, there was a lot of co-existence.
That's usually what happens when animals co-exist. Think about it -- if they weren't co-existing, how would they have any opportunity to eat each other?
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
So we knew they existed and we knew that the Maori told stories of and painted pictures of something remarkably similar yet we decided that the Maori knew about it because of all the Maori archeologists? I don't get why it would just be assumed that the stories and paintings were about snuffleupagus
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Re: (Score:1)
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You know, those legends would be easily explained if "dragons" turned out to be some sort of fire-breathing dinosaur, but we're not allowed to entertain notions of dinosaurs coexisting with humans in the time-line of biological evolution.
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That's because the few dinosaurs that survived the Asteroid Extinction evolved into warm-blooded feathered lizards... and by the time homo erectus arose, those feather lizards had become birds.
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It is well established that dragons were never something that people actually saw... they were imagined monsters. European written and oral tradition simply does not contain any credible tales of human-dragon interaction, and provides ample evidence that no such thing ever happened.
Thanks for playing.
Re:so... (Score:4, Insightful)
we're not allowed to entertain notions of dinosaurs coexisting with humans in the time-line of biological evolution.
You can entertain any notion you want. Don't expect anyone to consider your ideas anything more than entertainment until there's some evidence.
As far as the evolutionary time line, it's not a matter of "you're not allowed" so much as "there's a gap of hundreds of millions of years between the youngest known (non-bird) dinosaur fossil and the earliest known primate fossil." Call me when you find a dinosaur fossil from 100k years ago. Until then, I think I'll refrain from subscribing to your newsletter.
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I'm sure that the "fire breathing" stories are extreme exaggerations. To this day there are animals which excrete peroxides and other substances which when mixed (when they hit the prey, usually small bugs) get really hot (to boiling temperatures) and/or become caustic. There is definitely a beetle still living today which does this (bombadier beetle, IIRC?) and there may be a couple of lizards with this kind of mechanism.
Could that have been an alligator-sized lizard, or maybe something slightly larger? If
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the description in the Catholic Old Testament book "Bel and the Dragon" didn't breathe fire, but did have rather bad breath; I read an article once that compared it favorably to a Nile Crocodile.
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It wouldn't be the first time a "long-extinct" creature had been discovered to be not quite so long-extinct as we'd thought.
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It wouldn't be the first time a "long-extinct" creature had been discovered to be not quite so long-extinct as we'd thought.
Have any of these been ones that allegedly terrorized the populace only a few hundred years ago? I'd think something as conspicuous as a dragon would be easier to find evidence for. I thought most of the creatures that were thought to be extinct but weren't tended to have survived somewhere that people didn't frequent, rather than say mainland England.
Anyway, it would be hypothetical
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I had in mind a creature which was slightly less ferocious, and significantly less noticeable, which is probably why it wasn't hunted to extinction.
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I had in mind a creature which was slightly less ferocious, and significantly less noticeable, which is probably why it wasn't hunted to extinction.
But that is still a fire-breathing dinosaur in modern times that explains middle-ages dragon myths. A combination of something that there is no evidence of having existed in the last hundred million years, and something that there is no evidence of having existed ever. Hell, as long as this is still strictly in your mind, why not add in that it can turn invisi
Re: (Score:2)
European might not- but Jewish Greek Egyptian writings even included it in scripture (Bel and the Dragon, a kind of addendum to the Book of Daniel in which an encounter with a dragon is indeed described; one could also point out that a similar encounter is attributed to Alexander the Great). Of course, their dragon didn't have wings, and didn't breathe fire, just had bad breath. It was probably a crocodile.
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What about the horseshoe crab? Aren't there fossil examples of that from the Paleozoic Era, along with other trilobites? And what about the crocodilian arm of the Archosaur family, of which there are several hundred individual species alive today?
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What about them? So there are ancient creatures that survive in some form today. Sharks are another example. None of those are dinosaurs, and also unlike dinosaurs there is ample evidence of their survival into modern times.
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The Archosaur family, having evolved during the Triassic period, are considered dinosaurs, and half of them are land based without feathers. Trilobites, not so much- they're more related to scorpions and other insects than lizards.
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Archosaurs includes dinosaurs and crocodilians, but crocodilians are not dinosaurs. Trilobites aren't even close to dinosaurs. :P
But be that as it may, I'm still not seeing your point. Crocodiles are alive today, so maybe some non-avian dinosaurs are too, but we just haven't found them yet? What? Throw me a bone here.
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Which is even farther from dinosaurs than the example of crocodilians given by the other poster.
Seriously, are you trying to show that there are creatures who date back hundreds of millions of years? So what? I know it's possible for a species to have survived that long, it's just that so far as we know dinosaurs aren't among them. Excepting birds of course.
Or is it just that this ancient reptile is from NZ? :)
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A combination of something that there is no evidence of having existed in the last hundred million years, and something that there is no evidence of having existed ever.
Careful now. If you start using arguments like that, I might ask you for evidence that "missing links" ever existed. We know they did, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Careful now. If you start using arguments like that, I might ask you for evidence that "missing links" ever existed. We know they did, right?
We predicted missing links, and absolutely yes we've found missing links, for an absolutely astounding number of cases in the last ~150 years. Even as the term "missing link" changes to mean the link between the last "missing link" subsequently found, and whatever it was supposed to be linking. Again and again. The gaps in the fossil record are ever-shrinking, and p
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Fire breathing isn't hard to explain. Fish control their depth using a swim bladder, which contains air (providing buoyancy) and is squeezed to increase the fish's density. A few species of fish generate electricity for communication and attack. If you pass electricity through salt water, you can separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. A fish that stored hydrogen in its swim bladder, instead of air, would be able to fly, using its flippers for directional control, rather than lift (although it would need
Re: (Score:2)
I see crocodiles as a subspecies of dinosaur- given when they evolved as a definition of "dinosaur"- during the mid Triassic, much earlier than the Cretaceous era. Thus they are an example of a non-avian dinosaur species that survived the Cretaceous -Tertiary extinction event.
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I see crocodiles as a subspecies of dinosaur
Biologists don't. They consider them a relative of dinosaurs, but they are different for valid biological and phylogenic reasons. Dinosaurs and crocodilians are separate branches of archosaurs. Look it up.
given when they evolved as a definition of "dinosaur"- during the mid Triassic, much earlier than the Cretaceous era.
That's a pretty bad definition. Lots of things, including even more distant reptile relatives of dinosaurs such as Icthyosaurs, evolved during
Re: (Score:2)
Because, as everyone knows, the snuffleupagus co-existed not only with man, but also with the elmo. If the snuffleupagus tried to eat a human being, the elmo would be very angry with them. One of them might even go so far as to write a song about them.
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This is all after he stopped being Big Bird's imaginary friend [wikipedia.org].
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From TFA, the actual news is that the Haast's eagle had a body structure that could support predation, rather than just scavenging, as was previously thought. Since humans are blamed for their extinction, you've got yourself a bit of a chicken/egg situation on non-co-existence.
Video link (Score:5, Informative)
There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Video [youtube.com]
Shame on you for talking up something so cool and not providing a link.
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It's not actually flightless, though it does spend most of its time on the ground.
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You know, the video does show that fact around the 31 second mark. FYI.
Re:so... (Score:5, Informative)
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
The native bat is not flightless. It does a funny scamper thing along the ground but this does not make it flightless.
But, the Haast Eagle was unconfirmed before this? I've been brought up and it's always been a fact to me.
Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.
When the first polynesian settlers showed up they would have climbed out of their Waka http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/waka-canoes [teara.govt.nz] and on to the lunch menu.
Re:so... (Score:4, Insightful)
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.
A human much easier meal than a moa? The first humans before they knew about Haast eagle maybe, then the occasional child or woman, and then it was over for the easy meals, more likely encounter was full grown Maori males looking for a vengence and the high status of coming back in the tribe with Haast eagle beak, talons and feathers...
Imho it was the occasional human meal was what caused the extinction of Haast eagle, probably more than overhunting of the Moas: No easy meal after the first few unaware victims, and systematic destruction of nests, youngs and preying adults afterwards...just like all other predators meeting the homo sapiens and having the bad idea (well, more the natural idea not yet eradicated by darwinian evolution) of thinking "this naked monkey looks like easy meal".
And not only eat the good old homo sapiens, but also eating any of his food stock would turn a bad idea for long term survival: RIP wolves, american lions, lynx, ...: a top predator sharing territory with a sufficiently dense human population is doomed.
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What have Texans got to do with it?
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There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa.
I have a question: what made you think of Maoris as "defenseless"?
Was it the full face carved tattoos?
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If a bunch of tattooed Maoris come at you with their wahaikas, taiahas and kotiates, there ain't gonna be much defense involved on their part.
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because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
You mean 'was designed to'.
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I don't mind the karma burn, just can't let a joke slip by
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Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders.
However unlike Australia, not all of them are poisonous and potentially fatal to humans...
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Bats are still mammals, and there are certainly species of bats in NZ that predate humans.
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Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
I think the usual claim is no mammals except for bats. There were other animals that you didn't mention, such as worms and centipedes.
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Actually, it's Lieutenant Pedantic