Lonesome George Is Dead At 100 154
New submitter camperdave writes "Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old."
DNA Record (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope we keep extensive, redundant dna samples. There's no reason we can't at least keep a record for posterity.
Re:Unknown? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...died on Sunday of unknown causes..." Old As Fuck. That's why. Fucker's 700 years old in dog years.
Old? For an apricot, yes. For a head of lettuce, even more so. For a mountain, I have not even begun. For a turtle, I was just right.
Re:Poor bastard... (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe they were separated by about ten million years; to put that in perspective, humans and chimps split 4–8 million years ago.
And to put THAT in perspective. He tried it three times ago with a female-thing that's even 2 to 6 million years further apart from his biology than man is away from monkeys.
Yuck. Must. not. think. about it.
Re:Poor bastard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shh! You're ruining my gig! These people think I know something!
At least one news site made the same mistake. I inferred it from there, after giving up my hunt for an answer to that exact question and assuming they knew something. Clearly trusting journalists was a mistake.
Re:Poor bastard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me ask you a question as a biologist -- I've learned too that species encompasses all individuals who can interbred with each other and produce fertile offspring. But some livings have a too weird reproductive cycle to be reconsilidated with that definition.
Lets look at the common dandelion (Taraxacum sect. Ruderalia). There are three kinds of dandelion plants out there, looking all the same. But some are diploid, others triploid and quadroploid. Triploid dandelions are sterile, they can only clone itself to reproduce. Diploid dandelions can interbred with other diploid dandelions, and their offspring is quadroploid. Quadroploid dandelions can't interbred with each other, but diploid dandelions can interbred with quadroploids, and the offspring is triploid. Here the story would come to an end, because triploids are sterile. But sometimes during cloning, something goes wrong, and a diploid seed is produced, causing a fertile diploid dandelion to grow, and now the cycle starts again. So how does a biologist classify the dandelion individual, where most dandelions are infertile, some can't interbred with each other, and only one kind is quite fertile, but does not reproduce itself during interbreding? One could define one dandelion individual as being all the plants from a diploid, it's quadroploid offspring, the triploid F2 generation and then all clones until the next diploid clone. But then we get into the "divisible individual" contradiction.
How does a biologist deal with such situations? Just some handweaving "Yes, this is weird, but you get the term species in general, do yo"?