Sunday, January 15, 2012

Survivors Of The Future

The largest animal group: Arthropods are animals with segmented bodies and six or more jointed legs. They are the largest animal group on Earth. In fact, more than three out of four of all animals are arthropods. They are found everywhere - on land, in trees, in freshwater and saltwater, and even underground. Arthropods are generally small. Most are less than 1 cm long. Some arthropods, however, are quite large. The giant king crab, for example, measures over 3.2 m from the tip of one outstretched leg to another. Some of the most familiar arthropods are butterflies, beetles, flies, ants, bees, spiders, scorpions, shrimp, and crabs.

The arthropods constitute over 90 percent of the animal kingdom.


The earliest guest of our planet:
Arthropods provide the earliest identifiable fossils of land animals, from about 419 million years ago in the Late Silurian, and terrestrial tracks from about 450 million years ago appear to have been made by arthropods.[49] Arthropods were well pre-adapted to colonize land, because their existing jointed exoskeletons provided protection against desiccation, support against gravity and a means of locomotion that was not dependent on water.[50] Around the same time the aquatic, scorpion-like eurypterids became the largest ever arthropods, some as long as 2.5 metres (8.2 ft).

Future belongs to them: Their track record strongly recommends that in future they certainly will evolve with more adaptations to the changing scenario on our planet, while humans and other animal species have a weak chance to survive. May be they rule the world with greater sizes and with adaptations unknown and unimaginable so far.

Insects and grasses: It's hard to imagine that if we humans misuse our nuclear war potential, who will survive on this blue planet except Insects and Grasses (as grasses too have special tissue structures which makes them a better contender for survival than the Dicot plants) !!



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