I Like Coelacanths

One of my favorite things is when something from the fossil record comes knocking on your door. I not only love the whole idea of a “living fossil” but actively root for various plants and animals to break on through from past to present. Don’t laugh. It’s rare, but it does sometimes happen.

The most famous example is the coelacanth. The coelacanth was thought to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. In 1938 someone caught one. Surprise! Turns out they’re not common but they’re not extinct either.

I love it when a 400 million year old species just plain appears. It was something us smart monkeys didn’t expect. I’d love to have one of these ugly bastards in a giant pressurized fish tank in my secret lair.

There are other “living fossils” that are not quite so rare or surprising. Crocodiles are a gimme; they just plain exude “dinosaur”. Less obvious and more cool is the “not-quite-a-trilobite but really darned close” biological freakshow called a horseshoe crab. They’re said to be 450 million years old and indeed they look pretty alien to me.

Not all living fossils are butt ugly. The dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) is easy on the eyes. Metasequoia was first described in 1941 as a fossil of the Mesozoic Era. At the time it was thought to be extinct by about 150 million years. Shortly thereafter, a few turned up in China. The trees hadn’t gotten the memo.

Since then folks have planted them in various places. It seems to do well enough. It’s possible it wasn’t persisting in the most advantageous spot and we may not know it’s true potential size when grown in better locales! Neat eh? A tree that just about lost the race during the ice age gets a second chance due in part to the assistance of smart monkeys. Everyone pat yourself on the back.

I’ve personally seen a metasequoia and if you know what you’re looking at they’re kinda’ inspiring. They’ve been planted here and there in the US and all over the globe. That makes me happy. I researched putting a few in my yard but my climate’s not right. Bummer.

I’d love to be able to look past my coelacanth tank and see a metasequoia in the yard. (Not a horseshoe crab though… they’re too ugly.) The picture below is a row of smallish metasequoia growing in the UK.

China seems pretty good at harboring ice age refugee tree species. Ginkgo biloba is a tree (usually just called ginkgo) that goes back 270 million years (that’s the early Jurassic y’all!). It was a big deal in its time but tanked. It gradually faded and was thought extinct. But one orphan species survived in, you guessed it, China. Genetics show it came damn close to buying the farm too!

Here’s a picture of ginkgo leaves. They look nothing like more common trees. They’re weird!

If you live in the right climate and have a hankerin’ to plant your yard with Jurassic trees, you can plant ginkgo. It’s not a hard cultivar to find. It’s not a shabby looking tree either. It turns bright yellow in fall. Also, it’s fairly hearty and long lived; said to be biologically capable of a 2,500 year life span. One drawback is that ginkgo plants attract hippies with theories about medicinal botanicals. You may have to fence the hippies out. Here’s a photo of a gorgeous ginkgo in Tokyo.

Of course, the critter that really interests me is the woolly mammoth. These furry tanks went extinct about last week in ecological terms. (I know there are people who flake over ecological conditions on shorter scales but the end of the ice age is waaaaaaaaay more recent than the postulated extinction of coelacanths and dawn redwoods.)

Here’s the thing about woolly mammoths. I want ’em back!

Woolly mammoths got screwed! They took it in the shorts from climate change at the end of the last Ice Age. Global warming, caused by Trump’s failure to embrace the non-binding Kyoto protocol, did most of them in around 10,000 years ago. Despite SUV caused climate change, it’s likely they’d have straggled into modern times if only smart monkeys with pointy sticks didn’t hunt the shit out of them. In fact, a small population of Woolly Mammoths lived on Wrangel Island (Siberia) until 1,700 B.C.

Think about it. There were 800 year old pyramids in Egypt while woolly mammoths were shitting on the tundra in Sibera. So close!

I know there are smart people going all mad scientist on the challenge of cloning one and I’m all for it. I’m rootin’ for the dudes in labcoats big time! I would love to see a woolly mammoth in a zoo before I die. If I really got my druthers there’d be a restored herd of those bad boys roaming Northern Alberta… and I’d have a hunting tag for one!

Don’t laugh. The woolly mammoth is a do-able challenge and stranger things have happened. Some of you are reading my blog on a supercomputer/NSA spy device that you carry in your pocket; so is my hope to see a woolly mammoth really that impossible?

I could go on forever but I’ll stop with a new one I just learned about. This is “a Pleistocene ancestor of the narrow-leafed campion (Silene stenophylla)”. It came about from DNA some clever dude extracted from a seed found in a 32,000 yr old squirrel cache. Seeds are good at persisting and permafrost is good at preserving seeds. End result? The dude got enough DNA to do what needed doing. He cloned it in a modern seed, grew it, and viola… a thing that’s been extinct is now growing in a pot. How cool is that? (Hat tip to Never Yet Melted.)

It’s a cool little plant with a big story to tell. Every time one of these things make it past the “damned near extinct” or in this case the “totally extinct” barrier. I’m happy. Especially if woolly mammoth steaks turn out to taste good.

One more thing. I saw Jurassic Park too. Get over it! It was a book and a movie; not a warning about man’s hubris wrought large. Metasequioa trees and coelacanths aren’t chasing us around like velociraptors. And there’s no reason why woolly mammoths dying off in 1,700 BC is somehow key to human survival in 2,019 AD. It’s just change. I’m an Adaptive Curmudgeon, not a snowflake that sits in the corner weeping over change. Yes there’s risk in anything “coming back from the dead”… but I’m willing to accept a little risk for a little biodiversity… and mammoth BBQ.

I wonder what soil and climate Silene stenophylla needs? I’ll look into it. If you hear about an outbreak of formerly extinct ice plants menacing humanity; it’s probably just me experimenting in the garden.