AzurePhoenix

The Blue Whale is certainly the largest known animal alive today, and is probably more massive than any creature we have fossil eidence of. (Some saurpod dinosaurs are speculated to have reached even greater sizes, but evidence is sketchy at best.) A blue whale is on average upwards of eighty feet long and can easily weigh 150 tons, with animals measured up to a hundred feet long and possibly as much as 200 tons. On the otherhand, giant squid are puny by comparison, reaching lengths of thirty to fifty feet (as far as we know), much of this consisting of their lengthy tentacles. Large sharks, small whale and such are often more massive than the giant squid, which only grow to a max of maybe two tons. Anywho, the collosal squid of antarctic waters is though to be larger than the giant. The BLue Whale is a balleen whale, meaning that it feeds mainly on schools of small krill by straining water through bristle-like balleen plates. The Sperm Whale is the large toothed whale known to feed on giant squid.

AnswersInGenesis is no better a source than the back of a children's cereal box. Ideas are twisted, and information is left out and often enough made up entirely. The site only tells you what it wants you to hear, which is that everything is as it is because "God intended it that way and is great and infallible and who are we to question him?" Sometimes that site sounds reasonable enough, but in the end it's all creationist manipulation.

This thread is about it too

My understanding is that it's scientific name is "Tiktaalik roseae" for "shallow water fish," like in the article above. Can I ask where you saw the term Lota lota? I can't find it.

Heh, you full well know how much I agree with that The issue is, that while such courses of action may logically be "the right choice" for ultimate longterm success, they're unnacceptable when it comes down to humanitarian sensitivity or ethics (and I'm not saying that these aren't worth considering). The proposer doesn't even have to be off his rocker to believe in his seemingly insane suggestion, he just might place more value on the big picture than any individual pixel. ---Edit---

It just strengthens my resolve that if an abortion needs to be performed (for reasons better than simply "oh crap I'm pregnant"), it has to be done early, with the necessary and unfortunate exception of extreme circumstances that might require an abortion later on.

It was actually a German "bird," and however much a bird it was, it was still clearly saurian as well.

Quite a few species actually. A google search wil bring up a ton of info, but I'd look specifically into Sinosauropteryx and Microraptor, and basically anything new from the dromaeosaur group.

Various Heathen Deities above!!! I didn't even realize.... I have a little over half an hour to build my bomb-shelter and steal the neighbors' cats to supplement the cans of food I have packed away for just such and occasion...

Hell if I know, it doesn't make any sense at all, but it's what the idiot's want.

Naw, these are an as of yet unnamed human species somewhere between sapiens and the much older erectus; the ones I showed you were Homo sapiens idaltu, a slightly older subspecies of Homo sapiens than we are (H.s.sapiens) It's ridiculous, they wouldn't be satisfied unless the skeleton had half full-formed chimp-bones and half full-formed human-bones.

As cool as that particular disorder is, the "Indigo Children" are basically just a bunch of stuck up twerps who a bunch of New Age believers think are more advanced than normal people, whether in mind or spirit, rather than anything physical. People claimed to be of that particular delusion get their name because their auras are allegedly indigo as seen by folks claiming to be able to see such things.

We can't really even begin to guess at how many are enough like earth to host earth-like life. When I say similar, I mean recognizable as being alive. Probably far different, but possibly with recognizable traits convergently similar to some of the features earthers have got. I just don't think it's wise to make assumptions at this point about how life originates, we only have one example. Anyone's guess is as good as any other. That's just the one I feel is more likely. ---edit--- particularly because we know it happened at least once this way (even if we're not sure what way that happened to be ), I'd say it's safe to assume life could originate in such a away again without much problem, but there are still likely other modes of abiogenesis or development from the get go that will lead to other variations too.

I'm of the line of thought that there will be at least a few standard "variations" of life-origins. Each might occur a number of times depending on certain conditions or simple chance. I think some would lead to completely alien organisms, or even entities unrecognizable to us as life, while other modes might share a similar abiogenesis and method of developement as earth-life, leading to lifeforms at least vaguely similar to earth-life.

Not very practical, or not at all when you consider the sheer extent of the rising waters. Say you do build a big wall around each "victim city" strong enough to hold back the water. What then? It'd basically be surrounded on all sides by water and would sit below sea-level. It's just not practical. When the time comes, people will just have to move, or grow gills.

What would it matter to them even if it were a hoax? We already have a bunch of other possible "missing links" between the two as it is. Even if this one was fake, it wouldn't mar the validity of the others. Of course they claim they're all hoaxes or misinterpretations too.... Anywho, more and more the term "missing link" is starting to bug me for some reason. Maybe it's just the public's mangled interpretation of the term.

Eh? Why stop it even if there was a dismally pathetic chance that we could? I've always been hoping to see a super-eruption in my lifetime, this just doubles that chance

I've just heard that they tend to be rather intelligent, with alot of social failings and a tendency to be arrogant with a very strong self-importance. Not to mention that when psychic look at them, they supposedly see an indigo aura, which I guess is special in some way. I think i've heard they're supposed to be innately aware of a greater truth of the universe and/or god I say they're definately not real in regards to the meta-stuff, which is basically how they define an indigo from any other smart brat

Logic seems to indicate that the idea of there not being "aliens" is simply absurd, bordering on the same sort of reasoning that convinces people to believe in the literal interpretation of a certain book. I personally feel that life may be rather common, maybe even enough to show up in our solar system on multiple worlds at some points. I think it's likely that life is prevalent throughout the universe, ranging from the most simple to beings far beyond us (the more complex/advanced the rarer of course), but i do not think it is at all likely that we will ever encounter anything from beyond our solar-system (even in the form of picking up some sort of alien broadcast), and I do not believe that aliens have ever been here. Perhaps at some point in earth's long history something showed up, but I doubt it. The sheer vastness of space seems to me to be the factor in there being many living worlds, as well as the factor that leads to us never encountering anything of extra-solar origin.

Now what might happen if we gathered them all up and squished them into a tight ball and dropped them over... say, the San Andreas fault from four thousand feet?

Yeah, the genetic material from a female's cells has been taken in the lab and used to fertilize an egg, but I'm not sure about how it's done.

Hell, look at how many species we've driven to extinction wihout causing a global collapse. It would take many tens of thousands of species across the entire face of the planet to make an impact of world-killing proportions, and not just any species, but must be widespread enough to take out countless key species important to the welfare of entire ecosystems. And just to restate what must be an irritatingly overstated detail by now it would have to strike the seas AND be biased against biggy animals too.

None better for it methinks. Just rmember, no one can blame any of you if you go a little mad with righteous fury every once in a while

A virus probably wouldn't pose a threat of extinction to most species, because as Phi pointed out, survivors would adapt, particularly on the insect scale. Pests today adapt to chemicals specifially designed to target and obliterate them, in a very short time I should point out. They reproduce too quickly to be taken out that way. But, in the scenario that it wiped out a of the larger species, which is far more likely than any insects; while it would pose a threat to the survival of that species primary predators, IF those predator's depended solely on the species wiped out by the disease, onlt that particular region would come under any stress. And not every species chain within that very same range would likely suffer the same process, because once again, the disease would have to take out every herbivorous species. Indeed, certain species would survive and thrive in the absence of competition. To put it simply, for this scenario to happen, the disease would have to jump very far, over a very broad range, again while somehow favorably biasing itself to not kill small species, and it would have to strike very hard and very fast. And that leaves the entire range of ocean life that went extinct at the same time.