The weird and wonderful creatures of prehistory.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

There was a Discovery series during the 90's called Planet of Life

docuwiki.net...

One episode was about ancient oceans. Awesome stuff. Would fit right in with the OP. It did not immediately default to dinosaurs but discussed quite a bit predating them. Even single cell life. Very interesting.

Your OP got me thinking enough that I had to do some Google-ing and then, ultimately join this site just to add to the discussion.

I've seen lots of posts showing images from Mars showing "trees". Many of these have been explained as dust/dark matter that is projected onto a white surface and only looks three-dimensional due to the angle of the image.

But there are definitely images I've seen that show a large field of, what looks like, trees sticking out of the ground and all casting a shadow in the same direction. Here is one of the links, admittedly I don't know how legitimate the source is.

www.msss.com...

Could what we're seeing in these images be Prototaxites on Mars? The first signs of an ecosystem beginning again?

I don't know anything about the conditions necessary for this to happen, but I figured ATS to be an open-minded community where this type of q&a was allowed.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Love this stuff, much stars and flags...

And to offer some modern context for the importance of threads like this...
Quest

Before there was the cow, there was the auroch, a sinewy beast that roamed Eurasia by the millions. And over thousands of years, humans bred the creature into the millions of milk-and-steak-machines we have today. The last auroch, however, died in the 17th century. A group of scientists now want to bring back the auroch by selectively breeding modern cows-domestication, but in reverse.

Lately, a "de-extinction" movement to bring back long-gone creatures like the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon has been afoot. This slightly fantastical idea relies on animal cloning, a technique that works rarely, but just often enough to give radical thinkers hope. Meanwhile, the Tauros Programme to bring back aurochs, which began in 2008, eschews cloning for old-fashioned selective breeding guided by modern DNA analysis.

Over at Modern Farmer, Kristan Lawson has written a fascinating overview of the Tauros Programme (as well as its rival, founded by a disgruntled former Tauros scientist). The project began by examining auroch DNA sequenced from old bones found in Britain. Scientists then went looking for primitive breeds of cattle with segments of auroch DNA still intact. Today, they have second- and third-generation herds stashed all over Europe; give it a few more generations of selective breeding, and the researchers think an auroch, or auroch-like creature would emerge.

This is just one of a number of articles that has come up over the years about resurrecting extinct species...and one 60 minutes piece from last month.
60 Minutes