It’s Sunday, the formal beginning of the week. The weather has been beautiful in Chicago, and let’s hope some readers get salubrious time outside. It’s quiet here, as the students are gone and won’t, except for entering freshmen (who come two weeks early) return till late September. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus pose a funny question about evolution:
Hili: We have a question.
A: What is the question?
Hili: Did the last common ancestor of dogs and cats realize the gravity of the situation?
A: That is a question for a theologian.
Well, the time that common ancestor lived is a question for a scientist. And, as the wonderful TimeTree site tells us (a place where you can enter any pair of species and find when their common ancestor lived), that ancestor of cats and dogs lived about 55 million years ago.
Hili: Mamy pytanie.
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Czy ostatni wspólny przodek psów i kotów zdawał sobie sprawę z powagi sytuacji?
Ja: To jest pytanie do teologa.
*******
Leon and his staff are still in the mountains, and the Dark Taby is still fixated on noms:
Leon: I will wait here for the big fish.
The timetree site is remarkable. The Ruby-throated Hummingbird and the American Condor are separated by 87.8 mya. I’m stoked.
Now, wouldn’t it be cool if timetree could somehow reconstruct the appearance of the common ancestor?
Yeah, it’s a very cool website!
And good to know Hili and Cyrus are aware of their mutual ancestry. 🙂
I’ve wished for that feature, too. I’m reasonably sure it’ll happen some day…just not sure I’ll live long enough to see that day….
b&
Leon looks like a fishercat.
Was a good and bad last couple of days over in Europe. First, three Americans did a very nice job on a train in France to stop a terrorist. One was a college student, one national guard and one Air Force, thank you. Then a very bad air accident at the Storeham airshow, killing seven people.
Mountain streams are the best! And yes, they can even have the odd fish.
The Hili & Cyrus show reminds me of the recent paper on how d*gs, who are a North American bred clade, took a licking (halved in species diversity) when cats entered the american continents.
The supremacy of cats vs d*gs can’t be made much more obvious.