Evolution News: Early Flying Mammal Found In China

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The earliest flying mammal has been discovered in China. Anthropologists find cave in Africa with huge rock out-cropping that was altered to look like a snake by the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens. And the gene for autism is discovered by French scientists.

&hearts The early history of mammals revealed with even more fossils from China.

V. antiquus had elongated limbs, like modern flying mammals, and its skeleton suggested the presence of a stiff tail, which would have acted as a rudder in flight.

The researchers believe the creature was tree-dwelling, nocturnal and, because of its sharp teeth, most likely feasted on a diet of insects.

This new find places the V. antiquus as the earliest known flying mammal. Dr Jin Meng, an author on the paper and palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, said he believed the creature lived between 130 and 165 million years ago.

With the earliest known flying bird, Archaeopteryx, dating to about 150 million years ago, this could mean mammals flirted with air travel before birds.

The earliest record of a bat, capable of controlled flight, dates to about 51 million years ago; while, before this discovery, the earliest known gliding mammal was a rodent that lived 30 million years ago in the Late Oligocene period.

The variety and astonishing traits already showing before the tremendous Permian Extinction contines to astonish us. During this time, the biggest creatures were not mammalian. Though many larger ones were. The smaller mammals didn't leave many traces because perserving their bones intact like this amazing find, is very rare just as the preservation of the earliest birds are also a miracle. The right kind of mud has to cover them to preserve these delicate bones and details of feathers and fur.

We should now assume the jungles of those ancient times teemed with a wild variety of mammals. They didn't bounce back like the dinosaurs who filled many of the ecological niches after the Permian deaths.

But even during the dinosaur's reign, many mammalian species continued to evolve which is why many branches of this large family stretch back to before the great extinction, not after. The creatures which flew through the air were insect eaters.

The mammals that had big eyes, sensitive, very little hair on the ears, grasping hands, liked to live in tree tops and ate insects....is our own family. So I bet this animal is rather related to us. We didn't follow that lineage or we would all be flying like Superman, I suppose. Rats. I think I would have liked that, actually.

&hearts Throughout human history and prehistory, we worshipped and feared snakes.

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior, or what could be called religion. The finding, which researchers have yet to formally publish, comes from a cave hidden in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods.

"It's very big news," says Sheila Coulson, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo in Norway and leader of the study. Prior to the discovery, researchers had identified signs of ritual practice going back at most 40,000 years from sites in Europe.

Researchers believe that anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa perhaps 120,000 years ago. "The difficulty was always this incredible time lag between that occurrence and any more complex aspect of the culture other than just basic survival," Coulson says. Although some carved ornaments and wall markings from another African site are as old as the new find, they seem to have had no obvious ritual significance.

A chief of the local San people invited Coulson and her colleagues to study the cave in Tsodilo Hills. They were unprepared for what they found when they entered: a six-meter-long rock that bore a striking resemblance to a snake, including a mouthlike gash at the end. "My first words I remember saying are, 'My god what is that?'" Coulson says. "I'd never seen anything like it."

Fear of snakes: deep inside of the brains of all mammals is this fear. It is part of our most primitive parts of the brain, the Amaglada. The flight or fight center. I had this realistic rubber snake I used onstage years ago. My daughter took it out to the barn to play with her friends and she forgot to bring it back into the house.

That night, a terrific racket broke out in the barn and I ran outside with the flashlight. I raccoon was in deadly battle with the rubber snake. He tore the snake to shreds and when I shone the light on him, he ran out the door, fur bristling.

When breaking horses, one has to first let them know the rope isn’t a snake. If you drag a rope past a horse in tall grass, the horse will take off, eyes rolling with fear. Drag a rope past a cat and it will attack. Cats, large and small, don’t fear snakes because they evolved into hunting snakes. Turkeys, for example, and eagles, eat snakes. Watching a flock of turkeys surround and then rip apart, snakes, is most awe inspiring. They will literally play tug-of-war with the snake.

Humans, coming from trees, fear snakes just like small birds and all rodents. This goes back to when we were lemurs during the age of the Great Dinosaurs. One of the early differences between humanoids and chimpanzees was the desire to carry a stick at all times. Instead of picking up sticks and then dropping them, carrying a stick, putting a rock at the top of the stick, making the stick straight and smooth and using it to kill.

The very first creature Adam and Eve met that had them enthralled was a snake. Seems even ancient writers knew instinctively, the first God was a snake.

&hearts Good news: one of the genes responsible for the tremendously difficult syndrome of autism has been discovered.

ASD, which affect six out of 1,000 children, range from mild to severe forms. The disorders are caused by chromosomal rearrangements in 3 to 6 percent of cases.

In people with cognitive deficits and with autistic behavior a part of their chromosome 22 is often affected. That region contains the SHANK3 gene.

In all three families identified in the study, the researchers found they had various types of mutations in the gene. Two brothers in one family had small deletions, while another child in a different family had significant deletions.

A girl with a deletion of SHANK 3 in the third family suffered from autism while her brother, who had an additional copy of the gene, had a mild form of autism called Asperger syndrome.

Asberger kids can grow up to be quite good at many things, some are geniuses like Einstein. But the children who suffer from the worst forms of autism have very difficult lives and once we know what genes are causing this or missing genes prevent this, we might be able to craft a fix. I have known several profoundly autistic people. Some of them are very sweet but entirely in their own worlds. Some had real problems enduring life, small things irritating them beyond endurance.

This is good news if it leads to better therapies.

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Comments

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Posted by: JSmith | December 18, 2006 at 03:46 PM

ARG! I intended to do it! Sorry, Jsmith! Very sorry.

Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | December 18, 2006 at 04:14 PM

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