“The giraffes need to have another group next to them,” evolutionarily, Solounias says. Solounias estimates that the common ancestor of Palaeomerycid and the giraffe lived some 19 million years ago. This study is “reassuring, yes, they’re relatives to the giraffes,” says the giraffe expert. In fact, he adds, other researchers have pointed out those similarities before. “Cladistics is looking at similarities, so it’s not surprising that they’re finding those relatives to the giraffe,” Solounias says. You look at characters and match animals with characters.” Xenokeryx was classified as a member of the clade Giraffomorpha based on its physical characteristics.Ĭladistics – the means of classifying biological organisms based on shared derived characteristics – "is more or less like the stock market,” says Dr. In convergent evolution, different animals independently evolve similar traits as a process of adapting to similar environments. But, “that’s called convergent evolution.” The problem before was that conclusive fossil evidence for ossicones in Palaeomerycids had not yet been found.īut now, “They found evidence, finally, that separates the North American from the Eurasian animals into two different groups,” Nikos Solounias, a mammalian anatomy and evolution expert who has focused his research on giraffes and is not connected with this study, tells the Monitor in an interview. “They look very similar,” he says. “We have discovered that Palaeomerycids in Europe were not the cousins of the North American Dromomerycids,” he says. So Sánchez and his colleagues turned to Xenokeryx to test that hypothesis. “The majority of researchers thought that Palaeomerycids in Eurasia and the Dromomerycids in North America were very closely related groups,” Dr. These other ruminants, the Dromomerycids, are thought to be distant deer relatives. Scientists had previously connected Palaeomerycids to another group of ruminants that appear similar externally and whose teeth have features like those of Palaeomerycids. Sánchez tells The Christian Science Monitor in an interview. “The problem with Palaeomerycids is that really nobody knew where they belonged in the ruminant evolutionary tree,” study author Israel M. In a young animal, it grows separately and then fuses to the skull in adulthood. The scientists found that the front horns are ossicones, the same structure that gives giraffes their horns.Īn ossicone is a detachable unit. Xenokeryx has three horns, two small ones in the front of its head and a large T-shaped horn protruding from the back. What does self-defense mean in US? Subway killing shows divide. That is an awesome responsibility and a revolutionary opportunity. Even when the world is unkind, we can be unmoved in our determination to love, to build, to seek credible hope. Never to excuse or ignore cruelty or crime, but to recognize that how we view the world shapes the world. What is the media’s responsibility?Author and anti-apartheid activist Alan Paton once said of the Monitor, “It gives no shrift to any belief in the irredeemable wickedness of man, nor in the futility of human endeavor.”In addition to reporting acts of kindness, perhaps a next step is to see the world through a lens of kindness. But can this elevation only happen with stories of kindness? Must the rest of the news abandon us to despair?The world is asking us to consider that question deeply. She defined kindness and heroism as “moral beauty,” which “triggers ‘elevation’ – a positive and uplifting feeling” that “acts as an emotional reset button, replacing feelings of cynicism with hope, love and optimism.”The study suggested this happens when one watches a news story about kindness after watching ones about bombings, cruelty, and violence. They support “the belief that the world and people in it are good.” And they provide “relief to the pain we experience when we see others suffering.”It was her fourth point that stuck with me. A week ago, a British researcher published an article titled “Stories of kindness may counteract the negative effects of looking at bad news.” As you might imagine, I was intrigued.Kathryn Buchanan of the University of Essex shared four main takeaways from her research: Stories of kindness remind us of our shared values.
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