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I was going to say the same thing. Such a hardy species I would think would be the product of an incredible amount of evolutionary progress. How do they fit in
by dclowd9901 11y ago
I was going to say the same thing. Such a hardy species I would think would be the product of an incredible amount of evolutionary progress. How do they fit in with the rest of the living species taxonomy?
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoDon't get too excited - the Wikipedia article (very good) explores their genome and taxonomy. Fossilised records hard to come by but cambrian and Cretaceous records have been found. So probably boringly terrestrial
- babuskov 11y agoOr it could simply mean that they came to Earth a long time ago.
- iSnow 11y agoSure, but as of now, there is no positive indication they are extraterrestrial. They fit into the species cladogram, they don't seem to suddenly appear as a time anomaly, they just seem like extremely tough little guys.
- embwbam 11y agoI read somewhere that they can absorb DNA from foreign sources (other animals, etc) into their cells when they rehydrate, leading to an accelerated rate of evolution.
- pajaroide 11y agoHere's an article about that: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-huge-chunk-tardigrade-genome-foreign.html http://phys.org/news/2015-11-huge-chunk-tardigrade-genome-fo...