Would like to understand the scientific understanding that can be simply conveyed.
Thanks you.
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Teeth! That’s the only reason we know of them, and there’s only a certain window in time where the teeth come from.
There’s a roughly 3 million years ago to now timeframe that hasn’t shown up any teeth (yet…)
We haven’t seen any. And we’re tracking plenty of large and small marine animals. We track great whites and other large rare sharks. Most logically, they’d have to be where the food is, and a shark that size would need a lot of food. They were animals, not supernatural beasts. So we’d have found them by now.
The evidence we do have for them is millions of years old, and cuts off. That’s a fairly good sign of extinction. Not foolproof, but good.
Besides, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The burden isn’t on proving it IS extinct, it’s on proving it ISN’T. In other words, like the Coelacanth, it will remain extinct until someone finds one.
We haven’t seen any. And we’re tracking plenty of large and small marine animals. We track great whites and other large rare sharks. Most logically, they’d have to be where the food is, and a shark that size would need a lot of food. They were animals, not supernatural beasts. So we’d have found them by now.
The evidence we do have for them is millions of years old, and cuts off. That’s a fairly good sign of extinction. Not foolproof, but good.
Besides, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The burden isn’t on proving it IS extinct, it’s on proving it ISN’T. In other words, like the Coelacanth, it will remain extinct until someone finds one.
We knew Giant Squids existed for years before anyone ever saw a live one (and lived to talk about it) because they leave physical evidence. Aside from bodies that wash up on shore, they leave distinctive wounds on the bodies of whales that dive to the depths where they live. Their beaks, the only hard part of their body, are sometimes found in the stomachs of those whales.
Sharks constantly lose and regrow teeth, and we know megalodon had big ones, yet we don’t find any teeth younger than like three and a half million years old. We don’t see whales with bite marks and scars that would match those of a megalodon. In fact, the fact that we see large whales at all may be more evidence that megalodon is indeed extinct. While megalodon lived whales didn’t get much bigger than today’s killer whales. It is thought that megalodon may have created evolutionary pressure on the size of whales, forcing them to stay small and nimble. If this is the case then large baleen whales, including the blue whale, couldn’t exist unless megalodon is extinct.
We knew Giant Squids existed for years before anyone ever saw a live one (and lived to talk about it) because they leave physical evidence. Aside from bodies that wash up on shore, they leave distinctive wounds on the bodies of whales that dive to the depths where they live. Their beaks, the only hard part of their body, are sometimes found in the stomachs of those whales.
Sharks constantly lose and regrow teeth, and we know megalodon had big ones, yet we don’t find any teeth younger than like three and a half million years old. We don’t see whales with bite marks and scars that would match those of a megalodon. In fact, the fact that we see large whales at all may be more evidence that megalodon is indeed extinct. While megalodon lived whales didn’t get much bigger than today’s killer whales. It is thought that megalodon may have created evolutionary pressure on the size of whales, forcing them to stay small and nimble. If this is the case then large baleen whales, including the blue whale, couldn’t exist unless megalodon is extinct.
I have a follow up question: how was the coelacanth *missed* for so long? I believe it was thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous, and that’s a long time to have gone missing from the fossil record. Have post-Cretaceous fossils been found since its rediscovery?
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I have a follow up question: how was the coelacanth *missed* for so long? I believe it was thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous, and that’s a long time to have gone missing from the fossil record. Have post-Cretaceous fossils been found since its rediscovery?
I have a follow up question: how was the coelacanth *missed* for so long? I believe it was thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous, and that’s a long time to have gone missing from the fossil record. Have post-Cretaceous fossils been found since its rediscovery?
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