horsetuna

horsetuna t1_jcsa4ew wrote

Current theories is that they were domesticated first as food animals, and then people found out how good they are at other things.

The first horses domesticated were very similar to przewalskis horse... Small, mowhawk mane etc.

(Genetics indicate that the przewalskis horse is not a true wild horse alas)

I thought the Royal Tyrell museum of paleontology had a good lecture on horse evolution but I can only find theirs on evolution of horses in the Americas. I'll link if I can find it. (maybe it's the same one and it mentioned the Przewalskis horse too)

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horsetuna t1_jb7pezk wrote

For vertebrae it started with fish. Four fins, head and tail.

A good book about the line of fish to vertebrate is Your Inner Fish by Shubin

For insects it started earlier.

It probably originated simply from practical reasons... You want your head at the front to sense where you're going, and you want waste behind you so you don't run into it/eat it again. The limbs on the sides therefore is the best spots (of course there are exceptions to this body plan... Sponges, jellyfish, etc)

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horsetuna t1_jai8ddp wrote

Okay but that doesn't really answer my question. How far away would they have to be to be moving at, from our point of view, the speed of light?

I see your line about the Hubble constant etc but it seems to be just a commentary about that distance, not how far away a galaxy needs to be to be moving at SoL.

And I use the word appears, because it would appear to be moving at the speed of light from our point of view on earth.

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horsetuna t1_j6i5z8u wrote

Agreed.

According to the Guiness book of world records:

The most saline water body is Gaet'ale Pond, located in Danakil Depression, Ethiopia, with a percentage of salt by weight of 43.3%, compared to 40.2% of Don Juan Pond lake in Antarctica, 23.1% in the Dead Sea and an average of 3.38% in the world's oceans as a whole.

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horsetuna t1_j4ts8uz wrote

I don't know much about why they thought the peninsula formed. The current crater from the chixulub impact is half under the land and half under the sea, and does not seem to follow the coastline as it is today.

Mostly what convinced people was the timing and size. Before the Alvarez team (father and son) found the iridium in the KT boundary, there wasn't any evidence that there was a meteoric strike at the right time of the right size. After they found the iridium, they looked for other records from mining/gas companies, as people wanted the smoking gun .. the crater itself.

They calculated how big a bolide would be needed to coat the earth in such a way with this amount of iridium and then calculated the size of the crater, as well as the age.

The crater had actually been known for a while but the company that did the surveys wasn't keen on sharing their info due to competition concerns (not specifically about the crater iirc)

Finally once the crater was found, dated and confirmed it was accepted more or less. Better climate modelling showing the extent of the conditions also helped the case

Many think it wasn't the ONLY factor though. But a contributing one. The last straw that broke the camels back so to speak.

For instance the Deccan traps in India is the remains of a massive flood basalt that occured around the same time and likely contributed to the situation with the bolide (some claim the impact caused the volcanic eruption, the shock waves converging on the far side of the planet where India would have been at the time. But less evidence for that).

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