useless trivia.

[cab67]

I'm updating my lecture for tomorrow, which covers primate evolution and human origins.

There's a group of mammals in Southeast Asia that might or might not be related to primates called Dermoptera. They're commonly known as "flying lemurs," in spite of neither being lemurs nor capable of actually flying. (They're also sometimes called colugos, and they do sorta kinda look like the love child between a lemur and a flying squirrel or sugar glider).

Anyway - one of the oldest such animals in the fossil record has a genus name that literally means "skin beast."

Consider your life enriched. Maybe you'll win a few bucks on Jeopardy someday. You're welcome.

[dweller]

1. It could make an interesting sentence ...

A coat of many colugos .

🤔

[GreenWave]

2. Best wishes on your lecture.

[wendyb-NC]

3. That's what I was thinking

Just kidding.

I did find that info fascinating. Thank you, cab67, for posting it.

[Buzz cook]

4. Useless has a flavor all it's own

It's the dessert of the trivia banquet.

[dameatball]

5. "skin beast" sounds like what's on Trump's neck.

[mercuryblues]

6. Don't make me release the flying Lemurs

They don't fly and aren't lemurs.

[cab67]

9. or the dogs. or the bees.

or the dogs with bees in their mouths, and when they bark, they shoot bees at you.

[canetoad]

7. Very cool

More of this trivia please. It looks like their distribution ends at the Wallace line, although we have flying foxes here in Oz which neither fly nor are foxes.

[cab67]

8. flying foxes fly perfectly well.

All bats do.


Flying lemurs glide the way a sugar glider (or, in our hemisphere, a flying squirrel) would. They have flaps of skin between the hands and feet that act like an airfoil. These generate lift, but not thrust. Flapping allows bats to generate thrust as well as lift.

[canetoad]

10. There ya go!

I love learning this kind of thing.

[cab67]

14. Yet more useless trivia:

Unlike most other vertebrate groups, there are no giant bats in the fossil record. The largest fossil bats are about the size of the largest living bats (i.e. flying foxes).

The largest extinct flying birds, in contrast, had wingspans between 5 and 6 m (roughly 16.5 to 20 ft). These include a really big vulture-like bird from South America called Argentavis and a seabird called Pelagornis, whose wingspan was probably marginally wider. Argentavis is a teratorn, a group that might or might not be related to modern New World vultures and condors. We really don't know what Pelagornis was related to - it might have looked like a weird albatross, but wasn't related to them at all - and it had a serrated beak making it look like it had teeth (hence an older name for their group, the pseudodontorns).

I asked a couple of bat researchers I know this question several years ago. Apparently, bats' wings don't really work above a certain size, unlike those of birds and pterosaurs.

There is a "giant" vampire bat in the fossil record in the West Indies. It's name - I'm not kidding - is Desmotis draculae. But it was about 10 percent bigger than a modern vampire bat, and modern vampire bats are about the size of a mouse, so this wouldn't give one the impression of a vampire in bat form.

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Weird coincidence -- I was just flipping through Prothero's "Princeton Field Guide" to refresh my memory on some ...

obscure points. And here is one !

I was just reminding myself that there are two living orders of sloths -- the "two-toed" and "three-toed" -- and that they're not really that closely related to each other. Strange are the ways of evolution.

Lots of weird critters that appeared, evolved for a while, and died out, without leaving much change -- and no descendants.

[cab67]

12. The living tree sloths arose independently from different ground-sloth ancestors.

[eppur_se_muova]

13. That's what I remembered. It's just sort of fascinatingly weird.

Today, there are two-toed and three-toed sloths, very similar animals living in very similar environments. So most people would assume they are each others' nearest relatives. But they're only nearest surviving relatives, and the extinct family members constitute most of the history -- many dozens of extinct ground sloths ! And three-toed sloths diverged from the rest of the taxon not long after anteaters did, while two-toed sloths seem to be at the end of a long chain. That's why taxonomy based only on living relatives (as originally done by Linnaeus) led to so many, um, "misunderstandings". Linnaeus (or maybe it was Cuvier) originally lumped elephants, rhinos, and hippos together in the "Pachydermata". Now they're known to be less closely related to each other than to hyraxes, horses, and whales, respectively ! For those of us who don't specialize in such things, much of this is rather surprising, even disconcerting, news.

About twenty years ago I attended a 'general-interest' (i.e. not just for specialists, so even though a chemist, I didn't get lost in "insider" jargon) academic seminar on modern DNA analysis among living birds, and how it completely revised much of the taxonomy of birds. Large flightless birds (ostriches, emus, cassowaries, rheas) turned out not to be as closely related as thought -- apparently flightlessness evolved repeatedly among different, related lineages, so that flightless and flying birds were mixed within various taxons. Old World and New World vultures -- whose relationships were considered problematic, unknown to those of use outside ornithology -- turned out to have different lineages, another study in convergent evolution. And there was a suggestion that NW vultures descended from cranes, but this now seems to have been retracted or discarded. (Too bad I can't follow such developments in detail and still pursue my own profession.) In any case, I was much impressed with the way modern, detailed DNA analysis and cladistics (which was still something of a "new thing" when I first heard of the practice) had untangled a lot of confusion. Previously, I had considered much of the constant revision of taxonomies to be driven often by opinions as much as evidence. But here was reproducible, quantifiable evidence put to good use, and not much to argue in opposition. Quite a sea change. It makes one sorry one can't pursue multiple careers in different branches of science, just to experience all the progress that is otherwise so impressive to the specialist, and unknown "outside".