- Joined
- Aug 2, 2001
- Messages
- 191
Can someone please explain something to me, because I'm confused (something that is very easy to do).
I watched a programme the other nite about the Coelocanth, and how reclusive and rare a fish it is. Lots of scietist type guys and gals were raving about movement of fins, and jelly filled sacks in the nasal cavity and stuff, and about how it might be the missing evolutionionary link between sea and land animals, due to it's hinged fins.
I was really getting intrigued by the theories that were being thrown around about evolution, and how it was first thought that the fish used the hinged fins as rudimentary legs on the sea floor.
Then something was said, almost as a throw away remark, that made absolutely no sense to me.
They started talking about how the fish had no spine. Instead it had a hollow grisely tube filled with a slightly pressurised oil.
Eh?!
How can this be a link between sea and land animals if it has no spine? No vertebrae, or spinal column, just a tube with oil in it. Nothing else about this was mentioned on the programmed.
Now, I'm probably missing something really obvious here, and I'll look really stupid (again, something not difficult to do) but how would that work on an evolutionary basis? Why would fish evolve from a creature with a spine to a creature that didn't have one (essentially), only to decide that when it got onto land that it really needed one?
I need a lie down.
I watched a programme the other nite about the Coelocanth, and how reclusive and rare a fish it is. Lots of scietist type guys and gals were raving about movement of fins, and jelly filled sacks in the nasal cavity and stuff, and about how it might be the missing evolutionionary link between sea and land animals, due to it's hinged fins.
I was really getting intrigued by the theories that were being thrown around about evolution, and how it was first thought that the fish used the hinged fins as rudimentary legs on the sea floor.
Then something was said, almost as a throw away remark, that made absolutely no sense to me.
They started talking about how the fish had no spine. Instead it had a hollow grisely tube filled with a slightly pressurised oil.
Eh?!
How can this be a link between sea and land animals if it has no spine? No vertebrae, or spinal column, just a tube with oil in it. Nothing else about this was mentioned on the programmed.
Now, I'm probably missing something really obvious here, and I'll look really stupid (again, something not difficult to do) but how would that work on an evolutionary basis? Why would fish evolve from a creature with a spine to a creature that didn't have one (essentially), only to decide that when it got onto land that it really needed one?
I need a lie down.