What Dollo's Law means and what it doesn't

Lee Berman · 26 Jan 2011, 00:27 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:27:07 -0500
Subject: (urth) What Dollo's Law means and what it doesn't
Message-ID: <SNT123-W65469E680961228424AEB0CFFF0 at phx.gbl>

>Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: Let's look at the cetacea for an illustration.

Actually whale vs. fish fins are one of those classic examples of convergent 
evolution. Fish (ancient and modern) mostly have fins built on a fan-shaped
pattern of spiny rays. Whales have built their fins on the mammalian bone pattern
and humerus, radius and ulna structures can be found.

Being warm-blooded probably locked whales into being air-breathers. Water has much
less dissolved oxygen than can be found in air.  All gill-breathing creatures are 
cold blooded (though certain shark species eat so much and swim so fast that they
can raise their body temperature for a short time).

The interesting question to me is...say Earth had a 100 year long flood that killed 
off all land dwelling animals. After the flood receded, could certain whales colonize
the land, their parts reverting back to a land mammal form?

Less interesting is my discussion with Gerry on whether the darker grey humpback whale population
of the arctic ocean could ever end up looking like the lighter grey humpback population of the 
indian ocean.

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