Monday, October 31, 2011

This is a serious scientific article.....

And people wonder why I'm skeptical of Evolutionary Theory. Just read this whole thing and you will see someone trying to make a case for life acquiring characteristics in virtually overnight circumstances and retaining them.

But no proof other than Evolution must have happened so the only evidence considered has to fit into the theory.

Now will someone explain to me why this is any different than Bible thumpers quoting genesis! 

Mountain beavers evolved thicker teeth to eat volcanoes
It all goes back to those teeth. The mountain beavers have hypsodonty, meaning their teeth are high crowned and extend way past the gum line. This, along with the extra thickness of the teeth, provides a lot of room for extra wear and tear. It's a feature that cows and horses have evolved to deal with the relatively gritty, fibrous material - grass, basically - that they usually eat. The problem is that mountain beavers don't eat anything like that.

Now Samantha Hopkins of the University of Oregon has the answer. The mountain beavers don't need those teeth now, but they did about 10 to 15 million years ago, which is when these teeth features first appear in the fossil record. During that span, the volcanoes in the Yellowstone hotspot and Columbia River Basalts had frequent minor eruptions, spewing out huge swathes of volcanic dust that blanketed the mountain beavers' habitat.

This unexpected volcanic seasoning turned a bunch of soft plants into gritty chunks of silicon. The mountain beavers had to basically eat their way out of this volcanic age, and they developed suitably thick teeth to survive. What's particularly remarkable is how isolated this effect was - while the mountain beavers in the northwestern United States and Canada had to develop these hypsodont teeth, their counterparts just a hundred miles away in the Sierra Nevada had no such need. There were still volcanoes down there, but they apparently didn't reach teeth-changing levels of intensity.

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