In this month’s issue of Wired magazine, comes a timely piece from Sean Cooper that sticks out today, “Alien Animal Planet.” The gist of it is, a group of NASA and SETI Project researchers modeled hypothetical creatures on two distant worlds: one of which is a planet orbiting a red dwarf and the other, a moon orbiting a gas giant which itself is orbiting two stars. The main assumption each model works with is the presence of water. From here, the computers plug-and-chug, churning out some interesting creatures which are compared to Earth-like cousins. More Science than Fiction…
Well, you do not need to travel to distant planets on the other side of the galaxy to discover new species. Nope, apparently, despite all the satellite imagery, scavenger hunts and continental wars, a remote unexplored island in the South Pacific is home to dozens of new birds, frogs, flowers and a smorgasbord of other heretofore unknown entities:
Among the new species of birds, frogs, butterflies and palms discovered in the expedition through this pristine environment, untouched by man, was the spectacular Berlepsch’s six-wired bird of paradise. The scientists are the first outsiders to see it. They could only reach the remote mountainous area by helicopter, which they described it as akin to finding a “Garden of Eden”.
For those of you that have seen King Kong, you may have wondered why the dinosaurs depicted in the movie were not the typical kind seen in movies like Jurassic Park. Some of the lizards were shorter, others bigger or faster and just plain dumb. Peter Jackson said that he envisioned how evolution would have occured over the millennia on an isolated island; similar to the evolution of creatures on Galapagos islands. The end result was a change in their biological development due to environmental factors they had to continuously adapt to — hence their physical differences.
If nothing else, the newly discovered plants, animals and insects in the Foja Mountains empirically shows the dynamic biological evolution species underwent and continue to do so. After all, it is not like these fragile horned frogs, spiny anteaters and tree kangaroos somehow swam their way across an ocean or two from “Noah’s ark.� Or perhaps Chuck Norris somehow put them there.