4 types of living things that cannot appear in nature

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Evolution has spawned many different creatures. Nevertheless, its capabilities are still limited.

1. Giant animals

Huge monsters are the hallmark of science fiction films. Macaques as tall as a skyscraper, dinosaurs fighting with them, resulting from mutated iguanas, giant spiders and krakens. Moreover, the gigantic size does not prevent these creatures from remaining as mobile, or even faster than their prototypes from the real world.

But if the mighty Kong existed, he would have bigger problems than any lizard. The real challenge for him would be to get up and not break his legs.

In physics, there is a principle called the square-cube law. If the object is enlarged N times, then its new volume will be proportional to the cube of the number N, and its new surface area will be proportional to the square of N.

For an animal, this means that if, with an increase in size, the cross-section of its muscles grows, say, 10 times, then the body weight will increase by a thousand times, the English biologist John Haldane explained in his article "On the appropriateness of size." The animal simply does not have enough muscle power to support a huge body.

Another issue is bone strength. The largest herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs looked very modest in comparison with Godzilla: they weighed a maximum of 60-120 tons. The weight of the therapod predators reached 11 tons.

Moreover, with the evolution of 1..

2.. they have developed hollow bones like birds to keep their weight within reasonable limits. Godzilla, according to the calculations of fans, weighs 82,000 tons, and no bones are strong enough to withstand this colossus.

And finally, no ecosystem can feed monsters like Godzilla and Kong.

So, the poor fellows will die of hunger. The same sauropods, although they were smaller, disappeared, most likely because there was simply less food.

Really large animals can appear only in the water, as it reduces the load on their bodies. Therefore, the blue whale grows larger than the land elephant. But if you pull out M. D. Blood. Beached Whales: A Personal Encounter him ashore, he will quickly die from internal injuries caused by his own weight.

2. Living celestial bodies

If you develop the idea with really large life forms, then you can imagine a creature the size of a planet, the solar system, or even a galaxy.

For example, in the novel by Stanislav Lem "Solaris" there is an intelligent ocean. In the movie "Avatar" Pandora is also a whole organism. Living planets are also featured in many Marvel comics. The eternal comic book villain Galactus is just like a small star. And in anime and manga, such a flight of fantasy begins that it's scary to imagine. For example, creatures from "Gurren Lagann" the size of the observable Universe.

In reality, the size of living things on other planets will be about the same as on Earth, says astrophysicist Gregory Laughlin. This is because the speed of information transfer in neurons is limited: it is about 300 km / h. So, the signal crosses the human brain in about 1 ms.

But if it were 10 times larger, then we would think as much slower. Planet-sized creatures (the same Solaris ocean) would have had an even harder time. And creatures from the solar system are not destined to exist at all: any signal would pass through their bodies for hours, limited by the speed of light. Not to mention the fact that such carcasses would inevitably have difficulty with gravity.

Physicist Randall Munroe said that there is too much matter, whether alive or not. For the sake of a thought experiment, he described what would happen to a flock of birds the size of the solar system - this, of course, is not a solid body, but also not bad.

In general, the creature collapses under its own weight. And become a star.

3. Fire-breathing creatures

Daenerys Targaryen's dragons from Game of Thrones spew flame, like many other creatures in the myths of the peoples of the world. But the appearance of real fire-breathing animals is highly unlikely.

The reason is simple: in real life, a dragon would do more harm to itself with its flame than to those around it.

The creature from our planet that most of all pulls for the title of fire-breathing is the bombardier beetle. It is capable of firing from the back of the abdomen with a mixture of self-igniting substances - hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide. In the process, they heat up to 100 ° C, smoke and may well set something on fire.

But the beetle does not produce real "napalm". Take a look at this video for yourself and tell me if it really looks like a fire-breathing dragon's weapon.

The capabilities of the bombardier beetle are very limited, because overly explosive individuals simply will not survive. And neither they, nor reptiles can withstand direct contact with fire, says Rachel Keefe, a reptile and amphibian researcher at the University of Florida.

There are animals that can withstand high temperatures. For example, some marine worms live in really hot vents of underwater volcanoes. But without contact with fire.

Rachel Keefe, herpetologist

So, unfortunately (or fortunately), we will not see dragons.

4. Animals on wheels

A joke about the prehistoric species of pigs Sus ludus rotalis, which allegedly once lived in the Southern Pyrenees in Spain, has been wandering on the Internet for a long time. These are mountain pigs with wheels instead of hooves (here is the skeleton of such a creature). They knew how to slide down the slopes, gaining speed up to 100 km / h.

Naturally, such animals did not exist in reality and were invented as an April Fool's edge in the 2011 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine.

But why shouldn't such a boar appear? It seems great to have wheels: a bear attacked you, and you started the engine and drove away.

The wheel is the most important human invention. We can say that it was it that allowed us to build civilization in the form in which it exists. Yes, many creations of the human mind were invented by nature long before the appearance of us as a species.

The wings of airplanes resemble the wings of birds, the lenses of glasses are similar to the lenses of the eyes, analogs of fishing nets have long been successfully used by spiders, and the primacy in the invention of sonars belongs to dolphins.

But not a single animal uses wheels to move, although some, for example, caterpillars, can roll curled up in a ball. The reasons are given by the famous evolutionary biologist Herat Vermey.

First, the wheels are, when you look at it, an extremely poor way of getting around. It is convenient to travel on them only on flat surfaces, which are very rare in nature, otherwise we would not have to build roads for cars.

Wheels are unprofitable evolutionarily: an animal with them is less likely to survive than those with normal legs.

Second, in order for the wheel to rotate, it must be separated from the main organism. And growing such a part of the body is incredibly difficult. Plus, spinning wheels create more friction than a good old joint.

And finally, the main reason: wheels in living organisms simply have nowhere to come from, since the limbs developed from the paired fins of primitive fish that crawled out onto land in the middle of the Devonian period about 385 million years ago (we are their descendants, yes). And their principle of operation was initially not similar to the wheeled one.

Richard Dawkins in his article 1..

2.. Why Animals Don't Have Wheels explains that evolution happens gradually, not in leaps and bounds, and reinforces the most useful traits. Millions of years passed before the fin became a leg. But at the same time, it is also useful on land: you can move with it, albeit not as well as with the help of your legs. But the wheel must be designed to be perfect from the start in order to work properly: poorly fitted and not spinning, it is useless.

The lack of wheels in animals, Dawkins says, proves that evolution has no intelligent design. Things like limbs or eyes evolved by accident. The wheel must first be invented, and then built into the body, and evolution is beyond the power of this.