A few questions

[DTonesXD]

1. How does something like this happen? http://www.bbc.co.uk...europe-26764929

2. What is the closest thing to a dinosaur now?

3. Where did humans come from? Could we have come from plant mutations? In that case, where did plants come from too?

 

[pwagen]

1. Good genes and an abundance of nutritional sources.

2. Birds are thought to be direct descendants to meat eating dinosaurs.

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/dinosaur-evolution

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/apr/13/uknews.taxonomy

3. Both plants and humans, as well as every other living thing on the planet, shares a common ancestor. Further back than that, and we're delving into the area of abiogenesis, how life started, as opposed to evolution, how life diverged and developed.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-first-plant-evolved/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_descent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

[Delta1212]

1. Don't know enough about the specifics to comment on that particular case.

2. Birds. Birds are descended from dinosaurs. I find it easiest to see the resemblance when looking at baby geese, myself, but it applies to birds in general.

3. Humans are apes. We're descended from the same animal as chimpanzees. That animal was descended from the same animal as gorillas and orangutans, which was descended from the same animal as monkeys, which was descended from the same animal as rats, goats, elephants and whales, which was descended from the same animal dinosaurs, crocodiles and frogs, which was descended from the same animal as sharks, octopuses and jellyfish which was descended from the same organism as trees, E. Coli and mushrooms.

 

Other than picking out chimps first as our closest living relatives, there isn't anything particularly special about the particular forms I life I picked out, other than that they were less related to use than the previous set I mentioned and more related than the next, by the way. The point was simply that the first back in time you go, the more things you find that are descended from the same living thing and, if you go back far enough, all life on Earth is related.

[DTonesXD]

Thanks for the answers however still unsure on the 3rd question.. what was actually the first living thing? where did the first ancestor of humans come from?

[Delta1212]

Thanks for the answers however still unsure on the 3rd question.. what was actually the first living thing? where did the first ancestor of humans come from?

If you mean literally the first ancestor of humans, the first ever life form from which all other life is descended, the answer is that we don't really know.

 

We have a lot of ideas about how various structures are formed and we have some evidence that it isn't particularly difficult for basic compounds necessary for life to arise as part of natural chemical reactions, but how exactly, and under what circumstances, the first forms of life came about is a subject that is still debated because we don't have enough information to answer the question definitively at this point.

 

If you mean the first humanoid ancestors of humanity, that has slightly more detailed answers available.

[DTonesXD]

We'll in that case I have found science's unanswered questions then. Thanks though

[Delta1212]

We'll in that case I have found science's unanswered questions then. Thanks though

Science has a lot of unanswered questions. If it didn't, there wouldn't be any scientists.

[Phi for All]

We'll in that case I have found science's unanswered questions then.

 

I think you're asking the questions in a way that makes them more difficult to answer. Asking for human "ancestors" is an enormous task, made more difficult because you haven't limited any parameters.

 

Just like the chicken/egg paradox, asking for an exact creature that wasn't human but had the first human offspring is purely an intellectual endeavor. You could also go all the way back to the first ever vertebrate, in which case our first ancestors would be a fish smaller than your thumb but mobile because his skeleton is on the inside. Something like Haikuichthys paved the way for all vertebrates, at a time when every other creature was armoring itself on the outside.

[DTonesXD]

True, thanks