BIO 1130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Ocean Sunfish, Linnean Society Of London, Rock Hyrax

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Biology
• Course: BIO 1130
• Professor: Jon Houseman

Document Summary

Lecture 7: chapter 3, charles darwin and evolution continued. Rock hyrax (like ground hog), african elephant, and duogong (sea cow: these 3 animals are closely related. Darwin was aware that these all looked very different. But he said to determine pattern of life, we must consider past species (not only current species) Using fossils: 99% of species that have lived on earth are extinct. Most of the evolutionary branches finish in a dead-end. You can"t take dna from fossils: darwin found that these animals had similar dna, even though they had very different morphology, thus, fossils fill up gaps. Another ex; whales are closely related to hippopotamus: big gap between animals, but gaps are filled by fossils, this explained why each continent has its own fauna share a common ancestors proper to that continent. Crisis point: not enough resources for number of humans. Malthus predicted that human pop would crash at crisis point. Said we have to limit pop size.