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Showing posts from November, 2020

Piltdown Hoax

  On February 14th, 1912 in a small village in the rural county of Sussex, England, a local amuatuar geologist named Charles Dawson wrote to Sir Arthur Smith Woodward about an exciting new discovery. A bed dating back to the Pleistocene age was found at Piltdown along with the bone of a human skull. This caused Woodward to join Dawson at the bed and eventually they found an ape-like jawbone with human-like teeth, nicknamed the Piltdown Man. The most significant thing about this discovery was not that it was considered the missing link between, but that it proved Darwin’s theory and that the earliest humans had come from England and not Africa. The first suspicion that people had about the jawbone was that it possibly did not match the prior skull bone found at the site and that the canine tooth was missing. Later a canine tooth was found at the site to prove that this jawbone was one of the first early humans and another piltdown man was found a few miles away. The hoax was revealed in

Analogy and Homology

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  Analogous Two species that have an analogous trait are the  North American porcupine and the purple sea urchin. The North American porcupine can be found most numerous in the northwestern U.S and all of Canada. They are one of the largest rodents weighing in at 20 pounds. They have short brown or black fur, round bodies and a small head. Their most defining trait are quills that are lightly attached to the body and used for defense. Porcupines are not aggressive unless provoked and spend most of their time in the trees to find food since they are herbivores. They are solitary and nocturnal creatures that live in hollow trees or caves and are also very good swimmers. Sea urchins can be found globally across the oceans and reside from intertidal to about 5,000 meters below sea level. They are invertebrates most closely related to sea cucumbers and sea stars and feed off of algae. They are small, rounded creatures about 3 inches across that use a tube foot with the help of spines to get