FTFA: For context, they're only about 15 million years younger than the dinosaurs, and some 35 million years older than the oldest great apes. When they first arose, Australia was still connected to Antarctica, and the Himalayas didn't even exist yet.
They've changed very little over the past 49 million years.
What I find disturbing is that because we know so little about them, they merit the lowest categorization on the threat scale, least concern. Again FTFA, their habitat is under threat from deforestation and development... scientists have never seen the animal alive in the wild, they're not entirely sure where they live, or how many of them there are left.
I would have hoped there would be a category that basically means "stop what you're doing, we're in danger of wiping this thing out in our ignorance".
I would have hoped there would be a category that basically means "stop what you're doing, we're in danger of wiping this thing out in our ignorance".
For better or worse this is this is the case with too many species.
I'm not a huge treehugger, but this drives me to despair. [0]
Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.
I find it odd that this is the reason you would preserve these habitats. Humans have the technological capacity to wipe out all remaining forest habitats within a few decades, and probably will do so unless a wave of enlightenment comes over everybody. Wild animal populations stand at half what they were in 1975 and are headed for zero. Why would humanity stop the destruction for an obscure squirrel?
> I would have hoped there would be a category that basically means "stop what you're doing, we're in danger of wiping this thing out in our ignorance".
That's the precautionary principle. It would absolutely protect every location in the world -- in other words, it is completely unworkable and insane.
If you wipe something out that you never knew about in the first place, you've lost... nothing.
No, you just don't know what you've lost. If you throw away, say, a mint-condition Action Comics #1, you've lost a lot of money even if you go to your grave thinking it was just a dumb cartoon book.
20,000 years ago, an alien race made contact with a tribal chieftan. "We noticed you had a large supply of both petroleum and uranium on this world," the alien race said. "What would you like for them?"
"Both are worthless," the chieftan said. "Petroleum is sticky and disgusting. It gets on things and won't come off. Uranium burns anyone who touches it. It is a pox on the world. Feel free to take all of them; we need neither."
The alien race thanked the chieftan, and left him a gift of 200 cuts of bush meat. It then promptly removed 100% of Earth's valueless petroleum and uranium. The chieftan lost no sleep over the loss of these valueless things, and was certain his descendants would never miss them either.
----
To consider a unique set of genes assembled over the course of a billion+ years "valueless" shows a great lack of foresight. Each species is a resource of unknown and unstudied adaptations it may take millennia or more to replicate in labs. Our machines now are crude metal things; nature makes the ultimate machines. We're centuries away from catching up, at best. By the time we're ready to benchmark against what nature's already done the work to come up with, it may no longer be there to benchmark against, and we'll waste millions of man hours reinventing species we could formerly have just plucked from the jungle, swamp, sea, or desert.
New apex predators like man reshape the environment and cause extinctions; this is inevitable. Your certainty that this is also inconsequential, however, is misplaced.
Your chieftain story lures us to go wild with speculations about why we don't have more of other useful but rarely naturally occurring resources on our planet.
You have a valid point here, though let's hope that unknown species isn't a key link in some chain in the ecosystem, breaking which could cause an ecological catastrophe in the region.
The unknown, by definition, holds the value of the potential knowledge that can be revealed from it. From this prospective, a living species looses its value only in the moment when we know everything (whatever that means) about it. For now, we're nowhere near that level even for the simple unicellular life like bacterial species.
PeerJ paper on Zenkerella at [1]. I find it irritating that the article says "in a study published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ..." then never explicitly links to it.
[1] "Ancient phylogenetic divergence of the enigmatic African rodent Zenkerella and the origin of anomalurid gliding" [ https://peerj.com/articles/2320/ ]
Likely they did, just not in a way visible in their skeleton. Bones and teeth are the only things paleontologists can study, but the real animal has many more parts invisible to them. For example they likely continuously evolved resistance against new diseases.
People tend to think that constant evolution is the natural state of the world becoming "more advanced". But really, evolution will only happen when there's a reason. This species is related to a bunch of other species that did evolve, but apparently it represents a group that managed to stay in conditions that it was already adequately adapted for. Or there was no beneficial direction available in which it could evolve.
> People tend to think that constant evolution is the natural state of the world becoming "more advanced". But really, evolution will only happen when there's a reason.
This is fallacious. It's so wrong that it overlooks the term ("genetic drift") that specifically describes evolution that happens "for no reason". All species constantly evolve, as noted in nn3's sibling comment to yours. This one has preserved its skeletal structure, which is an infinitesimal part of it.
> The term living fossil is sometimes used in the popular literature, as if to imply a lack of evolution, and has occasionally also been taken to imply very low rates of molecular evolution, but scientific investigations have repeatedly discredited claims that these species do not change at all, as well as other misconceptions about living fossils.
> Living fossils are not expected to exhibit exceptionally low rates of molecular evolution, and some studies have shown that they do not. For example, on tadpole shrimp (Triops), one article notes, "Our work shows that organisms with conservative body plans are constantly radiating, and presumably, adapting to novel conditions.... I would favor retiring the term ‘living fossil’ altogether, as it is generally misleading."
One of the common error about evolution is that some people expect that any creature will evolve after certain time. I call it half joking the Pokemon model, were the specie accumulate experience points and then it magically evolve.
These animals are somewhat similar to "rat from trees" or "squirrels" or your preferred small mammal that lives in trees and eats fruit and whatever it can found. I'm guessing a little because I'm not a biologist ...
They probably lived all these years in a similar environment, i.e. trees in a tropical climate with lot of fruits and similar depredators. They live in an island, so they probably get few new fancy predator. They were well adapted for this environment 50mmy ago, they are well adapted now, and they were well adapted all the way down. So they had no good reason to evolve.
The question is why all the other evolved? (more guessing here). Perhaps some of them lived in a place that get some new predators, and the trees were no longer safe, and they had to hide underground, so they evolved to loose the tail and change the hairs. (Actually, this means that the population had a few variants, and the variants with longer tail get cached more frequently by the predators, so the ones with shorter tail had more children, so the average tail is shorter. But now the variants with longer tail get cached more frequently by the predators, so the ones with shorter tail had more children, so the average tail is shorter. After a few repetitions, the original variant is extinct an you get a new specie.)
Another possibility is that a part of the population get trapped in a zone with less trees with fruits and more grass wit seed, so they have to get used to walk in the floor instead of the trees, so they evolved a different kind of foots without.
Another part of the population live near a river with a lot of dead fishes, and they become better eating them. The climate change, and the tree disappeared, but they like eating fish and they evolve a different mouth and teeth, and some of them realize that they can catch the fishes before they were already dead, ...
After many of these changes and evolutions, you get giraffes, whales and humans ...
> One of the common error about evolution is that some people expect that any creature will evolve after certain time.
As I point out more thoroughly in response to farnsworth, that is not an error, it is correct. To prevent a species from evolving over time, it is necessary (though obviously not sufficient) that the breeding population be infinitely large.
They've changed very little over the past 49 million years.
What I find disturbing is that because we know so little about them, they merit the lowest categorization on the threat scale, least concern. Again FTFA, their habitat is under threat from deforestation and development... scientists have never seen the animal alive in the wild, they're not entirely sure where they live, or how many of them there are left.
I would have hoped there would be a category that basically means "stop what you're doing, we're in danger of wiping this thing out in our ignorance".