12 Living Fossils

great stuff! I love that mantis shrimp!

Thanks, rosborne. This is fascinating stuff.

Neat link rosborne979. Thanks.

Although all the specimens are awesome, the one that caught my eye, ros, was the chambered nautilus. Why? because it's the only time that I have understood geometry, and to my knowledge, the only time beauty has been demonstrated via mathmatics.

Fibonacci's golden spiral.



Oliver Wendell Holmes' beautiful poem, last stanza.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Here are some more patterns in nature for you Letty


Hexagonal patters are extremely common due to their close-packing shape and due to the prevalence of water on our planet.



Hexagonal pattern produced by light refracting through a small sample of water (about 1.5 cm in diameter) under the influence of vibration. The figure is in constant dynamic motion.

They may not be fossils, ros, but no two snowflakes are alike. Love the H2O molecule. Two parts hydrogen; on part oxygen, right?

Here's something we used to find all over the beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.



They are egg cases for a juvenile skate. The skate is related to sharks and rays. Sharks, skates and rays all have a skeleton made up of cartilage - the bendy material that is found in our noses and ears.
One tiny skate will hatch from each egg after nine months - hatching under the surface. The ones that lie on the beach too long are no longer viable, so I use to open them to look at the tiny embrioes.

There have been skate fossils found, but I cannot find a picture of one.

More patterns in nature

That Frilled Shark is fantastic and strange. I could look at that all day.

I like the video of the Velvet Worm (Onychophorans are very ancient creatures, showing up in the Cambrian as Hallucigenia and Aysheaia).

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/onychoph/onychophorafr.html


The caption below the Velvet Worm says they are closely related to Tardigrades.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/amazing-video-o.html#previouspost
What's interesting about the video it to watch the legs move. They appear to be driven by internal pressure. And I think that's how the Onychophorans also move. I never would have thought that Tardigrades are related to Velvet Worms.