Are cats the newest large animal on Earth?

[Badtz_Maru]

I hit Submit Reply too early. I was wondering if anybody else had heard anything like that, I did a search on google but I can’t seem to hit the right combination of words, ‘Jane Goodall Murder Gorilla Sex’ gets an odd mix of sites, nothing about this story I heard (and don’t necessarily believe true, but think possible).

[domina]

Duck Duck Goose, in the case of pit vipers and bears you’re talking about groups of animals rather than species. Do you know how old the species within these groups are?

Badtzu Maru, I think you’re confusing Jane Goodall with Diane Fossey. Fossey was murdered, Goodall is (I think) still alive. Also, Fossey was the one who studied gorillas (Goodall studies chimps).

[domina]

Sorry, that’s spelled Dian Fossey.

[Badtz_Maru]

Yes, I was wrong. I always get them mixed up. Sorry Jane! I did a google search for Jane Goodall Murder first, but didn’t really look at the pages that came up, just their descriptions, and one of them kinda did look like it said she was murdered by Rwandans, but it was because it was the way the segment of the sentence was reported on the summary page.

[Fiver]

And you mixed them up again, in the very next sentence after you said “Sorry Jane!”

Dian Fossey studied gorillas. Dian Fossey was murdered in the 80s.

Jane Goodall, still very much alive, studies chimpanzees.

Whether or not Fossey was doing the wild thing with the wild things, it’s most likely she was killed for making life so hard for the gorilla poachers.

[Sigene]

Jeez!
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/evolution/origins.html

http://www.umich.edu/~bio440/evolution.html

http://www.omnimag.com/archives/antimatter/evolut.html
What?? you tell me a puny group of fish doesn’t qualify as large? I got your little pissy little kitty cat right here!

http://members.tripod.com/~bigguapote/oldworld.html

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Flats/5328/aquarium/tang.html

(I hope the links work…)

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Pit Vipers: Sorry, that was a rattlesnake website. Bad on them for saying “pit vipers” and bad on me for not noticing.

I’m having an awful time nailing down a date for rattlesnakes.

Bears: Here’s one.
http://www.gov.ab.ca/env/fw/bears/bio.html

The grizzly bear evolved in the near and post-glacial, mostly treeless habitats of the Pleistocene (last 2 million years of reoccurring ice ages).

Re a possible chimp/human hybrid:

http://www.texnews.com/news/chimp012697.html

By JOHN MacCORMACK / San Antonio Express-News

SAN ANTONIO - Ending decades of speculation that he represents some kind of missing link, genetic testing has shown that Oliver the chimp is just that - a chimp.

Oliver, now a resident of the Primarily Primates sanctuary in Boerne, walks upright like a human. He was put on display throughout the world in the 1970s, touted as a mysterious man-ape perhaps the missing link.

“He’s not a human-chimp hybrid. His chromosome number is 48, which is a normal chimp karyotype,” said Dr. David Ledbetter, a geneticist at the University of Chicago who analyzed Oliver’s chromosomes.

Human beings have 46 chromosomes. For years, rumors circulated that Oliver had 47 and represented a biological amalgam between man and ape.

Also at:
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/04021998/graphb.htm

And there’s this:

For a real mad scientist scenario, I would anticipate that
human-chimp chimeras would be “viable”-i.e. capable of developing
through to at least the neo-natal stage. This is an extrapolation from
other successful interspecific chimeras-the “geep” (goat + sheep) for
example. What kind of a life such a being could have would give one
pause. Chimeras are produced by literally mixing together two
embryos at, say, the 8 cell blastula stage. Problems of incompatible
karyotypes do not arise.
-Lee Altenberg
Dept. of Zoology, Duke University

I don’t know enough about this. Anybody else wanna comment?

[domina]

DDG, the word “rattlesnake” refers to any of dozens of species of pit viper, so that might explain your difficulty.

As for a chimp/human hybrid, I don’t want to think about it.

[SpoilerVirgin]

I don’t know about a chimp/human hybrid, but this thread has brought back memories of the extremely creepy (although well-done) miniseries First Born about a human/gorilla hybrid which was shown on A&E several years ago.

IIRC, a scientist artificially inseminates a female gorilla with his own sperm, and then when the baby comes out looking mostly human, he takes it in (without telling his wife where the baby came from). It gets creepier from there. There were some particularly weird scenes in which the hybrid (named “Gor” – gee, that’s not a giveaway) meets his gorilla Mom.

[Badtz_Maru]

How much does a gorilla cost?

[Chronos]

So, just how are hybrids classified, biologically? To make this a little less esoteric, let’s look at a mule. What species is it? Is it even considered a member of any species?

As to Oliver, if he is, in fact, a chimera (rather than a true hybrid), then that wouldn’t necessarily be shown by the karotype of a single cell. Each individual cell would either be a human cell with 46 chromosomes, or a chimp cell with 48. I presume that the geneticists testing him thought of this already, and took samples of numerous different cells from different parts of his body.

[Colibri]

*Originally posted by Chronos *
So, just how are hybrids classified, biologically? To make this a little less esoteric, let’s look at a mule. What species is it? Is it even considered a member of any species?

If the parents are considered to be members of clearly different species, then the hybrid is not a member of either. A mule would be described as Equus caballus x asinus. A human/chimp hybrid, if it could exist, would be described as Homo sapiens x Pan trogdolytes.