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Examples of Persistence Hunting.

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Greetings. Throughout the Earth's long history of complex life forms, predatory animals have utilized several techniques in the effort to catch and dispatch prey animals in their respective habitats and environments. Some iconic species have been highly effective ambush predators, with modern-day wolves, cheetah, and the extinct theropods allosaurus, ceratosaurus, and velociraptor being charter members of the "ambush club."  Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Thylacine, or erroneously as the Tasmanian Wolf, was (is?) a practitioner of persistence hunting. A large marsupial native to the island of Tasmania, the Thylacine slowly stalked its prey until it forced eventual exhaustion, dispatching its quarry soon thereafter. With the species' claimed extinction, which is still hotly debated, the landscape of Tasmania has been left void of an apex predatory species, a situation which is the direct result of destructive human activities.  Some well-known species wer...
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The Corrosion of Informational Integrity: Human Indolence, Human Immorality, Human Stupidity.

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Greetings. Facts; not beliefs, nor opinions, and sure as hell not alternative facts. The advancement of knowledge and of our collective understanding of the universe is dependent on facts, objective information that allows for insightful inquiries into the mysteries of the natural world that surrounds our species. Thanks to the herculean efforts of scientists and public intellectuals around the world, our species has taken a few tentative steps forward on the exacting pathway towards understanding. The effort is difficult enough to undertake on its own merit without the introduction of toxic, inaccurate, and misleading information, content that has become more and more prevalent as time has moved forward. Who and what is to blame for this situation? The blame lies squarely at our feet. Inaccurate information is taken and accepted as valid. Disinformation and misinformation is devoured as if we were all about to starve from rampant malnutrition. Fake news is embraced by the blind, the w...
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What Does Evolution Have in Store?

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Greetings. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds (avian dinosaurs.) Complex forms of animal life.  About 530 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, fishlike animals with a notochord and eyes at the front of the body, such as Haikouichthys, begin to appear in the fossil record. By the late Cambrian, other jawless forms such as conodonts appear. During the Silurian, jawed and armoured fish appear on the scene, with giant placoderms such as Dunkleosteus, the cartilaginous Chondrichthyes, and the bony Osteichthyes. By the Devonian, fish diversity had greatly increased, including the placoderms, lobe-finned fishes, and early sharks, earning the Devonian the epithet "the age of fishes." The first major groups of amphibians developed in the Devonian period, approximately 370 million years ago, from lobe-finned fish which were similar in physical characteristics to the extant coelacanth and lungfish. These ancient lobe-finned fish had evolved multi-jointed leg-like...
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