Hard one. Like @safron, a Trilobite appeals to me (live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse!). They are my favourite extinct life forms. It may also have been neat to have been one of the first sea organisms to transition onto land.
5 Likes
It might be neat to be one of the more social dinosaurs. Either a pack hunter like Velociraptor, or a member of a sauropod herd. Or one of the many extinct parrot-like birds.
2 Likes
I had to look up LUCA (because I was a bit worried). Now I am uneasy⌠you okay? You were being humorous, yes? If so, I get it⌠2020 is even more of a mess than anyome could have guessed last year. Otherwise, letâs talk. 
1 Like
The Last Universal Common Ancestor was a population, rather than an individual. Stopping one individual of that population wouldnât necessarily change very much.
2 Likes
Right. Just like you figure â go back in time and kill Mitochondrial Eve, that just means her next door neighbor becomes Mitochondrial Eve instead. She wasnât literally like the Eve in the Bible story.
2 Likes
in ancient times
Thatâs what we want you to think ;)
2 Likes
I would be a Chinese paddlefishâŚ
It was declared extinct earlier this year, so if i was found then the species would still live on because of me and I think thatâs some cool stuff. On the contrary itâs despairing to note that the cause of their extinction was solely âHUMANSâ
The Chinese paddlefish is, or rather was , a unique species. It was one of only two living species of paddlefish, the other being the American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula), part of an ancient group of fish known to have existed since the Lower Jurassic, 200 million years ago.
It was also the only species in the genus Psephurus.
Fishing of the Chinese paddlefish goes back centuries, with annual harvest reaching 25 TONS!!! by the 1970s.
Since the 1990s, the species was officially listed by the IUCN as critically endangered, and was last seen alive in 2003.
A 2019 paper reported its extinction, suggesting that it had gone extinct sometime between 2005 and 2010, but had been functionally extinct for a very long time.
3 Likes
Is that similar to our Coelacanth? Was extinct, till they realised it wasnât. Despite living in the deep ocean, they are still contaminated with plastic.
1 Like
Not really like the Ceolacanth⌠The story of the Chinese Paddlefish is more similar to that of a dodo bird⌠Basically it was hunted to extinction.
Overfishing and building of dams were the main reasonsâŚ
I hope I have answered your questionâŚ
2 Likes
Iâll go with the creature that inspired my username, the humble trilobite. As in the 19th-century science poem, âThe Lay of the Trilobiteâ:
But gentle, stupid, free from woe
I lived among my nation,
I didnât care â I didnât know
That I was a Crustacean*.
*The poet later issued a correction admitting that âCrustaceanâ is incorrect, but it does make a killer rhyme.
4 Likes
âIf I was a Crustaceanâ would have worked as well and avoided the need for the correction. But that is a great poem. Thank you for linking to it.
4 Likes
Definitely the baiji (Lipotes vexillifer). Its story is devastating and is a reminder of the destruction humans inflict on the planet. The baiji is still listed as âcritically endangered, possibly extinctâ (functionally extinct) since the Yangtze River is gigantic, but its most likely extict since no certified sightings have occurred since 2007.
1 Like
I think Iâd like to be a dodo so I could warn my fellow dodos to be very wary of humans.
1 Like
Bishopâs Oo, 100%, because who doesnt want to suck juice out of Hawiian fruits all day? See you out there!
-Accipitridae
1 Like
I would be a dodo because theyâre so cute! And they didnât have any natural predators before humans came along; they just chilled on an island eating fruit. Sounds like a nice life.
2 Likes
Something limited their population growth though, right? Their population did not increase exponentially for thousands of years. Periodic food shortages? Storms? Disease outbreaks? What did in dodos before we did?
Ok, I did a Google search and dodos had a low reproductive rate and took a long time to mature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo
1 Like
It doesnât matter. As Darwin wrote, in the Origin of the Species:
*âThere is no exception to the rule that every organic being increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny. Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds â and there is no plant so unproductive as this â and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned to be the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pairs of young in this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair.â
Darwin, by his own admission, was bad at math. The calculation done correctly, shows there would be after 1000 years, about 30 million elephants. If dodos bred as slowly as Darwin assumes elephants do (which I doubt) and didnât die before breeding, the population would increase 15 million times every thousand years. The ancestors of dodos were on Mauritius, an island of about 2000km squared, for 26 million years. 15 million raised to the 26,000th power is a bit too large. Even 15 million is too large. The dodo, like every other species, suffered heavy mortality from something long before humans arrived. My guess would be food limitation and disease, with contributions from intraspecies conflict and storms.
1 Like
Well, that does help me not to feel guilty about discarding the seeds from fruits instead of feeling obligated to be a good little disperser and plant them. If every avocado seed I threw away grew to be a tree, that would be quite a food forest by now.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.