[PenultimateManStanding]

Richard Dawkins in his new book, The Ancestor's Tale offers his vision of a post-human world:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats. I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside. When all the relics of of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactively enhanced mutation-rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated except for the occasional lucky raftings: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within 5 million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabretoothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists organize careful archaeological digs (gnaws?) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporarily tragic circumstances that gave ratkind its big break?

[PenultimateManStanding]

This isn't at all far-fetched. Look at this member of the mongoose family that evolved separately in Madagascar where it has morphed into a cat-like form in isolation: The Fossa

[rogerhb]

Cockroaches: they were here before us, they will be here after us.

When explorers were doing their thing years ago they would bring back magical dead animals, eg a fish with feathers and such like. When they did find the remarkable they then weren't believed!

[PenultimateManStanding]

Right, the Platypus. It's one of those things you can't believe even if you see it swimming in a stream. Sabertoothed rats that weigh 400 pounds are more believable than Platypuses!

[PenultimateManStanding]

Another amazing bit of animal lore from the book concerns dimorphism, i.e. where the male is really big compared to the female as with elephant seals and gorillas. This happens when the males of the species have harems - polygyny. An interesting, to say the least, contrast is observed between chimpanzees and gorillas. Dominant gorilla males keep all the females for themselves and have full access to the females while the rest are bachelors. But with chimps, the females copulate with all the males indiscriminately whenever they are in oestrus. It is observed that gorillas have very small testes while chimps have very large ones. Explanation: the matter of who will fertilize the female's egg is settled amongst gorillas by chest, shoulder, and arm strength. Once the male copulator is settled, then that's whose sperm will do the job. But with chimp males, who are about the same size as the females, they all get 'a shot' so the most likely to impregnate the female is the one who makes the most sperm. Simple!

[PenultimateManStanding]

Anybody heard of the bonobo chimps? Their version of 'hello' is to show their sexual apparatus. 'Hi! Glad to see you! Check this out!' Chimps are, of course, our nearest relatives. What a life! Swing through the trees and make merry all the live-long day. Who needs oil!