aggienaut | The Pinnacle of Evolution

   Once upon a time, the only fashion choices were whether to use flagella or cilia to move your one cell about. Then some enterprising microbe, probably a slime mould in primordial Paris, decided to up the ante by consisting of multiple cells. The next 610 million years would be haunted with difficult fashion choices and concern about getting fat.

   Only 80 million years later the first avant-garde darwin-fish decided to really raise the bar and crawl out of the ocean onto land. It did not continue to rapidly evolve into a person holding a stick and then a briefcase as it climbed the rise, but did go on to become a staple of bumperstickers 530 million years later, which is quite the ~~feet~~ feat.

   363 million years ago the first beginnings of what would be the most civilizated race on earth appear. I'm talking of course about the emergence of flying insects, leading to bees.

   Then suddenly life in the oceans became very decidedly unfashionable. As a result, 90-95% of the former residents of the ocean would not be caught dead remaining there. Land was clearly where all the A-listers were to be found.

   Several fashion trends developed during the Mesozoic Era Of High Fashion, illustrating the inceasingly difficult decisions facing those on the cutting edge of evolution -- on the one hand a group calling themselves the dinosaurs were part of a "being immensely huge and scary looking" movement, while another group diverged into another direction with small sizes and fur coats. The "mammalian" movement of these opossum-like movers and shakers would continue for the next 215 million years.

Personally I think the Quatzalcoatlus pictured on right above was a high point in evolution

   Though one might think the alpha-predator look of the dinosaurs would be a more enduring fashion, eventually it went out of style and the dinosaurs were relegated to documentaries on educational channels until they had a very brief reappearance on the red carpet for the movie Jurassic Park 65 million years later, in which they clearly out acted their human co-stars... but for example this author never got around to seeing the sequels.

   Mammals quickly expanded into areas of style formerly reserved for dinosaurs. During this renaissance of mammalian experimentation, our furry friends even retook the sea from the "scary lizard" sector, with a daring entrance by pakiceta. 55 million years later one would never guess that the seaborne mammals are a late entrant to the marine category, though fish and sharks and especially the ancient coelacanth have proven to be very enduring designs themselves.

   And this, of course, brings us to the very highest point of evolution. Hundreds of millions of years of progress brings us to this amazing pinnacle of achievment.

The numbat is an Australian marsupial. It clearly could not be any more adorable, and the stripes upon its back are extremely fashionable.

Oh there's also humans, who, despite inventing soap operas, can sometimes hope to possibly achieve things as great as perhaps looking like a numbat:

Pictured above, my dear friend Maureen does a numbat impression for me.

Also, humans have also made it possible to view the follownig NUMBAT SLIDESHOW!!, but I apologize that human failings have caused some non numbat material such as some kind of large frog to creep in there.

ALSO! I've decided instead of responding to simple complimentary comments to this entry with "thanks!" I will respond with a new numbat picture to each one! So comment below for your very own numbat picture response! :D