Oct 10, 2012

The Extinction And The Gigantic ‘Catastrophe Group’




An odd-looking sea creature locally christened the “bubble shark” is breathing new life into a campaign to preserve a vital marine corridor straddling five provinces in the Southern Tagalog region. The bubble shark also described as an “inflatable shark” and is a new species of swell shark being observed in waters off Batangas and Mindoro Island. It is so named because of its defense mechanism to puff up to twice its size in the face of danger. This discovery of the weird shark adds a new meaning to efforts to save the Verde Island Passage Marine Corridor (VIPMC), a bustling sea-lane renowned for having some of the highest concentrations of shore-fish and underwater life in the world. The presence of the bubble shark was discovered last year by a group of researchers, who found a treasure trove of previously unknown terrestrial and marine wildlife during the year 2011 on Philippine Wildlife Expedition spearheaded by the California Academy of the Sciences. The shark found in the VIPMC “possesses a very distinctive camouflaged color pattern,” the report said. Other swell sharks feature dark round spots, but the species found in the Philippines, based on pictures, have white or lighter spots instead. The deep water Oarfish is estimated to be 50 feet in length. The Oarfish is the longest fish in the oceans.
The Sumatran Orangutan is threatened due to poaching and habitat destruction of the rain forests in Indonesia. Only about 6,500 remain in the wild, and their great ape species become extinct.
The Bactrian camel is critically endangered due to habitat loss and drought. There are approximately only 950 Bactrian camels left in the wild, struggling to survive in their native desert habitat in northwest China and Mongolia being used as a Chinese nuclear test range. These animals are also hunted for sport and because of missing food and water resources.
The polar bears swimming and drowning between melting patches of ice in their dwindling habitat have become synonymous with the global warming. Currently, 20-25,000 polar bears still roam the wild, but if climate change trends continue, the polar bears will be extinct within the next 100 years.
Forest clearing and degradation are main contributing factors to the Mountain Gorilla’s pending extinction, and only 720 animals of this species remain on the planet.
The last captive Quagga, a mare, died on 12 August 1883.The Quagga was hunted until extinction.
Pigeon meat was commercialized and recognized as cheap food, especially for slaves and the poor people, which led to a hunting campaign on a massive scale.
In the 1980s, a photograph of the Bondegezou was sent to Australian research scientist Tim Flannery. In May, 1994, Flannery conducted a wildlife survey of the area and discovered that the animal in the picture was new to science. Named Dingiso (Dendrolagus mbaiso), this forest-dwelling marsupial has a bold coloration and spends most of its time on the ground.
Central African tribes and ancient Egyptians described and depicted a bizarre creature for centuries, colloquially dubbed the “African unicorn” by Europeans. It is also known as the Atti, or the O’api, resembling a cross between a zebra, a donkey and a giraffe. Despite explorers, Western science rejected the existence of such a creature, viewing it as nothing more than a fantastical chimera.
In 1901, Sir Harry Johnston, the British governor of Uganda, obtained pieces of striped skin and even a skull of the legendary beast. Through this evidence and the capture of a live specimen, the animal now known as the okapi (okapia johnstoni) was recognized by mainstream science. The okapi is no less unusual today: it is the only living relative of the giraffe, sharing a similar body structure and its characteristic long blue tongue.
In 1926, an expedition approved by the American Museum of Natural History confirmed that the tales of a giant lizard were true. W. Douglas Burden, the leader of the expedition, returned with twelve preserved specimens and two live ones. The world was introduced to the Komodo dragon, a massive monitor lizard that grows up to ten feet, making it the largest lizard in the world. Komodo Dragons possess massive claws and fangs with which they can kill almost any creature on the island, including humans and water buffaloes. One particularly bizarre attribute of these creatures is their venomous bite, which has been attributed to bacteria-laden saliva or venom glands in the mouth.
A venomous, egg-laying mammal having a duck bill, a beaver tail, and pelt, is known as the platypus, one of only five extant egg-laying mammals. While formerly recognized by science, it is no less unique today: this semi-aquatic creature, native to eastern Australia, swims with webbed feet, uses electric location to hunt, and possesses an ankle spur that, in males, can deliver a powerful injection of venom non-lethal to humans.
Hybrid animals are crossbreeds between animals of similar genetics. They mostly exist in captivity and are the result of human intervention.
Liger is a crossbred between a male lion and a female tiger, while Tigon is a crossbred between a male tiger and a female lion. Ligers are the world’s largest cats. Tigons, on the other hand, are prone towards dwarfism .Male Ligers/Tigons are sterile, while their females are often fertile.
For a dog wolf hybrid, it is not known when it displays a wolf behavior, a dog behavior or something in between.
A zorse is the result of the crossbreeding between a horse and a zebra. A zonkey is the result of the crossbreeding between a donkey and a zebra. The Zony is the result of the crossbreeding between a pony and a zebra. All these three are called zebroids.
A grolar/pizzly hybrid is the product of a grizzly bear and a polar bear. Although the two bears are genetically similar, they tend to avoid each other in the wild environment.
A Leopon is the result of the breeding between a male leopard and a female lion.
A fluffy creature looks like a science experiment. It’s just a rabbit, however. They were exceptionally popular in the 17th and 18th centuries among European nobility as lap pets, and many different hybrids were bred to suit changing tastes of different royalty. The Angora rabbit is still popular to this day.
The Pelochelys cantorii, or Cantor’s Giant Soft Shelled Turtle, is one of the most unusual looking animals on the earth .Yet; few people have seen it or know about it. It’s not a sea turtle – the Cantor prefers to inhabit inland, close to streams and wetlands. It grows very large, with adult shells often spanning more than six feet. They are native to Cambodia, but they are very rare.
Pangolins are toothless and they have no external ears, though their hearing is very good. Since they have no teeth, they have a gizzard like stomach and swallow small stones and sand to help the digestive process. Pangolins have very long tongues - up to 16 inches in length - which are used to slurp up their favorite foods - termites and ants.
They have a good sense of smell and a poor sense of sight. Their scales, made out of keratin, (same material that makes up human fingernails) make up 20% of their total body weight.
''Involution is the process of self-limitation, of densification, by which the Absolute veils itself by
a stage until it assumes the appearance in the cosmos, the universe we know of. It wishes to create
the universe to objectify itself and its spiritual properties in infinite possibilities, for the purpose of
delight of discovery which it will achieve thereafter.  The evolution is the movement forward by which the created universe evolves from its initial state of divided, ignorant forms, emerges as Life and Mind, and in that process rediscovers its Source. The evolution occurs after the involution. It is the development and progressive movement of all in the cosmos, including humans, to attain its fulfillment, including rediscovery in delight of the spiritual aspect, that Consciousness-Force, that was the source of the creation. Generally, evolution is any process of change over time. In the context of life science,
evolution is a change in the traits of living organisms over generations, including the emergence of new species.  Since the development of modern genetics in the 1940s, evolution has been defined more specifically as a change in the frequency of alleles in a population from one generation to the next.''
'' The theory of "devolution" or backward evolution is the proposition that a species may evolve into
less primitive forms after having “evolved” over millions of years into a higher form. The Theory of
evolution as a forward progression and devolution as a regression is a reflection of the 19th century
ideas of Lamarckism and orthogenesis. Scientifically, devolution does not exist. More recently the
genetically-based biological evolution theory proposes that evolution occurs by mechanisms such as
natural selection, genetic drift, and mutation, and is therefore not directional, forward or backward
in time; and consequently "devolution" cannot a valid concept.''-
Involution, Evolution and Conscious Creation by Author Suzanne Tabor

The paleontologists declared that ''a mass-extinction took place between the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic.''
The extinction was triggered by the volcanism, oxygen deficiency, salinity oscillation, temperature rise and fall, marine acidity and pollution constituting a ‘‘gigantic ‘catastrophe group’, which led finally to a great event, mass-extinction.''The extinction depends on the evolution, adaptability, feeding habit and the mode of reproduction, as a research group noted in Yang Zunyi.
''In May 2002, the world’s governments gathered in The Hague, Netherlands, to address the planet’s biodiversity crisis. They declared that by 2010, they would significantly slow the rate of biodiversity loss. But subsequent reviews presented a gloomy outlook.

In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a $24 million, United Nations–supported research program that focused on past ecosystem changes and made projections about the future, released the results of its first four-year study. Societies, it said, were responsible for the wide­spread crippling of the world’s ecosystems. About 60 percent of global ecosystem services—the goods and benefits people get from biological communities and their environment—had been damaged. The assessment projected that things could get even worse in the next 50 years.

Three years later, the United Nations Environment Programme, with financial support from the European Commission, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway, issued an interim report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study. The idea for the study grew out of a 2007 meeting of environment ministers from the G8 countries (plus the five major newly industrializing countries) in Potsdam, Germany. TEEB highlighted the cost of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and its impact on human well-being. For example, in clearing forests for fuel or to make room for growing urban areas, grazing cattle or agricultural crops, enormous amounts of “natural capital” were being thrown away. According to TEEB, $2 trillion to $4.5 trillion is lost every year from deforestation alone.

By the time the Convention on Biological Diversity released the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 in May 2010, it was clear that the brakes had failed. The planet was losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. '', Hannah Hoag, a freelance journalist in Montreal noted.

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