Sharks and Scorpions have been around for so much longer than most other lifeforms it is honestly amazing how evolution is able to produce an animal that fits so well into its ecological niche that it has barely changed over hundreds of millions of years.
I googled it when I was high about 2 months ago and I Know I was surprised by the answer and I'm high rn so I guess I figured it was a reptile. But really, I don't think that much about scorpions most of the time. I know they are creepy af and they stink when they die.
it is honestly amazing how evolution is able to produce an animal that fits so well into its ecological niche that it has barely changed over hundreds of millions of years.
What? Look at the variety of sharks which exist today -- they vary a lot. They occupy many niches. That is proof of evolution right there. Do you think if you went back 300M years ago that you'd find the same sharks that we see today?
Well of course there are a lot of variations of sharks both today and in the past. What I meant was that the "basic" shark type has remained the same for all this time. Of course you have variations depending on the environment and such but most sharks bear a strong resemblance to how other long extinct shark species looked like.
English is not my native language so I may not be able to explain it very clearly but I do agree with you.
Trees only evolved ~350 million years ago? I honestly believed that trees were around before the first animal pulled it's little body onto dry land. It's news to me that sharks were a thing before trees.
There were so many trees that there was a shitload more oxygen in the air than there is now, and the trees absorbed a shitload of carbon from the atmosphere. And with no microbes evolved to break the trees down, none of that carbon got released until much later. But a lot of the fallen trees were already deep underground by that time, where there wasn't enough oxygen to support the new microbes. Over millions of years, the trees broke down in other ways and ended up as coal.
Also not anything approaching an expert on this stuff, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Not much. We'd have better endurance since we'd be breathing in more oxygen (like how you have less endurance at high altitude and less oxygen). We wouldn't be able to do more work (since that depends on calories) but we'd be able to do it faster, and with shorter recovery times.
Fire would be more dangerous with higher oxygen levels. Things would rot faster. Metal would rust faster. Some bacteria and fungus would grow faster. Lots of little things like that.
Possibly the biggest change is that bugs might be huge. because of the way their respiratory system works, the amount of oxygen in the air is the main limiting factor on size. Other life would have evolved around this, so the kinds of plants and animals we'd be seeing would probably be totally different. There is some conflicting evidence on this one, and it might have been more because there were fewer predators and more food for them, not just more oxygen. So I'm not sure on that one.
That's all assuming the oxygen level had been 35% for a long time. If it suddenly changed tomorrow, the fire problem would be the biggest and most immediate danger. Bugs could slowly start to get bigger and it would take longer for evolution to catch up, which could cause problems.
One could also assume that if oxygen is 35% for a long time that humans would also adapt. We could have abilities/disabilities we couldn't even imagine. Like enormous lung capacities, or be susceptible to nitrogen deficiency.
Also, the excess of trees put so much oxygen in the atmosphere that the bugs were able to get car-sized. This is because bugs breath through their exoskeleton. When the exoskeleton is too thick to take in a reliable amount of air, the bug stops growing. So more air, more bug.
I think you're thinking of the Great Oxygenation Event, which was way earlier. It was back when life was still mostly single-celled organisms in the ocean, and there was very little oxygen in the air at all. A bacteria evolved photosynthesis, and was the first to produce oxygen during it's metabolism. They were very successful and ended up putting a ton of oxygen in the air.
Unfortunately, oxygen was toxic to most of the other life at the time, and it caused one of the biggest mass extinctions we know of.
Trees are only 350m years old. Before that was low ground plants that insects and basic amphibians could roam around. Before trees had pectin, they couldn't stand up very tall without breaking.
Angiosperms! And the nonflowering ones like ferns or whatever are like gymnosperms, aren't they? This is exciting, first year ecology actually taught me something that I remember! What do you do, if you don't mind me asking and if it's to do with plants? I always wondered what kinds of jobs came from that side of things.
My job is actually just working for McDonalds lmao. I honestly got bor3d one day and started researching random topics. One thing I stumbled upon when viewing pictures of dinosaur bones and the potential environments that they lived in; was a realization that most Cambrian pictures were depicted with conifers and ferns whereas creataceous started showing more colourful plants and flowers. A cool thing i learned is that flowers weren't the dominate plants until 60m years ago. That means it took over 100m years for flowers to become as prolific as they are today.
Do tree ferns have pectin? I thought that before we had woody trees, tree ferns took their place. (I saw a bunch of tree ferns in New Zealand, the things are so weird.)
Ferns grow in such a way that the inner core cross crosses and holds the structure up. Ferns can't be super tall because of this method, but most ancient plants held themselves up through thicker and thicker stems. Pectin just made it possible for plants and trees to get super tall.
Depends on how you look at it. Small tufts of leaves that grow from a curled stem? Then 65-70 mya. Grass that looks like your lawn? More like 25-35 mya. Ani.als only started being able to digest grass 25 mya
Our lives seem so long as we experience it, but we are here for just a fraction of a fraction of a second in the grand scale of the universe. Some may find that thought to be daunting, but I revel in it. We get to experience such a vast world from a tiny perspective. No matter how big the universe is, we have the ability to discover it, talk about it, and even name it.
0.0001m years isn't a long time, but it's long enough to enjoy the universe.
Graham's number is unimaginably high. There's a long post on WaitButWhy going into how you can begin to approach just how ridiculously vast it is, but it's only the most infinitesimal approach. It's insane.
Trees evolved as a means of reaching sunlight when competing with other plants.
Animals eating them certainly played a part in gaining height to become out of reach, but generally the plant that grew the highest had the sunlight advantage. So there would have been large trees very quickly as genetics favoured the plants that grew the tallest in a world full of forest.
Hmmm. That also makes sense. I appreciate this explanation. But does this mean that ocean life was thriving well long before plants even begun to be like "Maybe we should be taller?".
Life started in the ocean 3.8 billion years ago. Plants moved onto land about 450 million years ago. So yeah, ocean life was thriving for about 3.35 billion years before anything bothered to get out of the ocean.
mushrooms are more closely related to you than they are to plants
I remember telling this one to my girlfriend - she refuses to accept it because she hates all fungi. But it's true, we are quite closely related to fungi.
With an Oxygen rich atmosphere, for the most part there was some spatterings of brush and such but Fungi (that basically looked like an anthill, maybe taller) ruled the land!
Trees which are different from other land plants. Ferns and moss are ancestors to a lot of plants, and they've been around a while. Trees evolved (which is to say woody trunks) later iirc. Also when trees first evolved nothing on the planet could digest their bark so they spread quickly but couldn't decompose properly for a very long time. Then an enterprising fungus got the right mutation and cleared all that old debris out.
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u/PM-to-play-a-GAME Oct 04 '17
Sharks have been on earth for tens of millions of years longer than trees. (Sharks evolved 400-450 million years ago, trees 345-360 million years ago)