Convergence; butterflies with dinosaurs (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 05, 2016, 23:57 (3063 days ago) @ David Turell

A butterfly-like insect existed at the time of dinosaurs, fed on trees and disappeared. Later our current butterflies appeared. Another example of Simon Conwat Morris convergence: - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/butterflies-in-the-time-of-dinosaurs-... - "Biologists Steven Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris famously butted heads over a simple thought experiment: if we were to “rewind the tape” of life and allow it to play out again, would we get the same result? - *** - "Conway Morris argued yes: without any sort of goal, the unchanging laws of physics and demands of Earth's environments dictate that more or less the same creatures would and have evolved repeatedly on Earth. Such a process, he argued, inevitably results in the emergence of beings with high intelligence. In other words, the environment induces the evolution of more or less the same solutions (though small details may obviously be different) when unrelated groups of organisms move into the same environments. - *** - "Apparently, way back when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, a group of insects called lacewings produced butterflies. Not the butterflies we see flitting around today from the Order Lepidoptera, but floating, flapping, nectar-sucking flibbertigibbits nonetheless, with wings adorned with eyespots, veins, and scales. - "Mesozoic butterflies seem to have appeared so similar to today's incarnation that at a few paces you'd probably not notice a difference. They evolved 165 million years ago, disappearing just 45 million years later, a full 45 million years before the first modern caterpillar decided to grow up and become a beee-youuuu-tee-ful butterfly. Again. - "Oh, and these first butterflies did not frequent flowers, because flowers were still a gleam in Mother Nature's eye. Tthe first definite floral fossil dates from 125 million years ago - about the time these ancient butterflies were going extinct - but the first flower must have evolved at least a little before that. The flowers that did exist were small, inconspicuous, and aquatic with short, butterfly-unfriendly floral tubes. - "Instead, these Jurassic butterflies seem to have alighted on seed-bearing, cone-making trees. Though they did not make flowers, these plants did craft cones studded with long tubes ending in nectar and pollen. And nectar + flying insect, evidently, are the prerequisites for evolution to cook up a butterfly. - "Cretaceous butterflies are more formally known as kalligrammatid lacewings. Lacewings still fill the Earth today. Their members include little-known groups like antlions (also charmingly called doodlebugs because of the tracks the larvae make in sand); owlflies; and silky winged-, spoon-winged, and thread-winged lacewings. - *** - "Kalligrammatids seem to have lived almost exclusively on land that is today Europe and Asia during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. They were large, with wingspans in excess of six inches, and would have been some of the largest and most conspicuous insects of their day. It would be accurate to imagine them flitting past a herd of grazing dinosaurs. - "Modern butterflies are defined by suite of traits that includes daytime activity, long, straw-like sucking mouthparts, wing eyespot patterns and wing scales (Lepidoptera literally means "scale wing"). All of these traits that can be determined from fossils are present in kalligrammatids - *** - "Kalligrammatids also had one or more pumps inside their heads for generating suction, just like modern butterflies. Both groups also seem to have wielded proboscises with a variety of thicknesses and lengths for harvesting the nectar of different plants. - *** - "To Conway Morris, to me, and to many others, it is striking how often evolution has produced the same solutions to the same problems in the same habitats with presumably the same selective pressures, starting with very different raw material. As with most arguments of this nature, the truth probably lies in between the two extremes. In my opinion, Earth on replay would doubtless have many similar - perhaps startlingly so -- organisms to what we see today." - Comment: Convergence shows pattern development as the environment allows. Much longer article than could be presented. Many interesting observations especially about complex feeding parts