Times Conflux - What is a living fossil?
Living fossil has always been a term that has played on my mind. From a young age, looking at pictures and reading animal books, animals that were called living fossils were always the most fascinating and weird looking specimins around, and that it what attracted me to wanting to learn as much as I could about them, but what really is a living fossil? What does it mean to be a living fossil?
The term 'living fossil' was coined by Charles Darwin in his Origin of the Species to relate to organisms that had withstood the test of time. Although the term represents those organisms that have shown resiliance and remained largely unchanged for millions of years it is not an ironclad scientific term, thus there is no solid formal definition. So for the sake of this new series of posts, a living fossil will be determined as an animal that appears to be similar to a species otherwise known from fossils, typically with no living relatives (not always the case) and demonstrating low taxonomic diversities.
This alone I find fascinating. Living fossils have, for the most part survived extinction level events without succumbing to the most powerful forces that nature has to offer, but this does not mean they haven't in some way evolved. Every animal, no matter how old changes based upon differing environmental conditions, usually meaning that in most cases the animals have settled in a niche of favourable conditions allowing for any physical and behavioural tweaking to be kept to a minimal, after all, if it isn't broken don't fix it.
The blog posts that will follow in this series will each focus on 2 animals deemed to be 'living fossils'. They will range from sharks and platypus to hoatzin. Each post will offer an in depth insight into the selected animals. Covering every single species in this classification would take an exceedingly long time, so I will be picking a selection of animals that I find the most interesting and fascinating.
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