Posted on 08/11/2015 8:08:43 AM PDT by Thistooshallpass9
In 1681, the last dodo bird on the planet breathed its last breath. But that was not the final chapter of the bird’s story.
Some 300 years later, botanists on Mauritius—the island where the dodo had lived—noticed that a certain species of tree was rapidly dying off. Tambalacoque trees had historically grown in abundance on Mauritius, but by the 1970s only 13 remained. And all of those remaining were thought to be around 300 years old. Even though they were producing fruit containing seeds each year, none of the seeds were sprouting into saplings.
This meant that no new Tambalacoque trees had sprouted since the late 1600s.
The Tambalacoque’s average lifespan is roughly 300 years, so the last trees of the species were very near the end of their lives. Once those 13 died, the Tambalacoque would be just like the dodo—extinct.
An American ecologist named Stanley Temple wondered if the dodo’s extinction 300 years earlier was connected to the Tambalacoque’s inability to reproduce, which had also set in about 300 years earlier.
Temple traveled to Mauritius to study the Tambalacoque, and made a fascinating discovery: When the dodos were still alive, they would eat the Tambalacoque’s fruit, and only after the seeds had journeyed through their digestive tract could they successfully germinate.
Researcher and writer Robert Doolan explained the discovery:
The tree’s seeds are encased in a thick-walled protective coat, but the dodo’s stone-filled gizzard was able to exert a powerful crushing pressure on them. The bird’s gizzard (a second stomach for grinding food) would pound away at the seed’s coat, weakening it and cracking it a little, but not enough to damage the seed inside. When eventually deposited by the dodo, the seed was able to germinate.
After making this discovery, Temple found a solution to the Tambalacoque’s decline. He brought some American turkeys to Mauritius, and found that their digestive process was similar enough to that of the dodos to be able to activate the Tambalacoque seeds. Thanks to Temple and the turkeys, the Tambalacoque lives on to this day!
The dodo went extinct back in 1681, but 300 years later, it delivered a posthumous message to mankind: The Tambalacoque and the dodo bird would had to have come into existence at the same time in order for the Tambalacoque to survive.
This message presents some problems for the evolutionary theory. Evolutionists say large trees evolved some 360 million years ago, while the ancestors of today’s birds “arrived comparatively late”—about 65 million years ago. That would have left the Tambalacoque tree with no way to germinate its seeds for some 300 million years. The dodo’s message challenges the random mutation theory of evolution—and on this front the bird does not stand alone.
A look at Earth’s ecosystems reveals several other instances in which one species is dependent on another for its survival, or in which the two are mutually dependent: There’s the Calimyrna fig and Blastophaga wasp, the Catalpa worm and Braconid, the Yucca plant and the Pronuba moth, and many more.
In each of these cases, the brilliance of the Creator is on display. The intricacy of His physical creation is clear. And the account of how He created Earth’s sophisticated ecosystems is confirmed.
It should come as no surprise that evolutionists have different explanations for these biological relationships. There’s no shortage of dissertations explaining how such dependencies could have gradually happened over eons as the organisms evolved. Many impressive books explain how it is all still the result of chance mutations. And powerful rebuttals discredit the findings of Temple and other such discoveries.
These explanations and rebuttals fit a predictable pattern of evolutionists attempting to counter any findings that contradict their theory. In many cases, their logic is remarkable, but the premise from which they start is flawed.
In the centuries leading up to the Scientific Revolution, the Catholic Church reigned as the chief authority and knowledge source for much of the world. The clergy generally viewed scientists and their discoveries as a threat to Catholic doctrine. Church officials sometimes embarrassed the church by trying to defend mistaken church teachings such as geocentrism, which science offered empirical evidence against.
Competition between science and religion heated up. For some in the science camp, the desire to undermine church authority became the main motivation. Some scientists challenged God’s very existence as a way to discredit the foundation of religion. Such reasoning spawned the evolutionary theory. Its proponents sometimes undertake studies with that conclusion already firmly in mind. Whatever they can contort into supporting the arguments for evolution, they keep. All else they often reject or downplay.
When society’s most impressive minds all seem to agree that evolution is fact, it can become difficult for us to keep our faith from going the way of the dodo. But that doesn’t have to be the case. To bolster your faith in the Creator, set aside some time to study our free booklet Does God Exist?
We need to clone the dodo back to life so we can farm raise the things and have tasty dodo nuggets
And the American turkeys are not native to that ecosystem. What will the consequences be?
Well, the democrat party base pretty much consists solely of Dodos but I doubt they’d be palatable under any conditions.
;>)
The lesson is “Overspecialization is an evolutionary dead end.”
DON’T BE A DODO!
One of the extinctions that upsets me the most. They looked so darn cute and weird.
False premise, the tree could not live without the dodo, therefore it couldn’t have existed before the dodo.
Two errors, #1 the tree can live with any other creature whose digestive tract thins the shells, (the example of the American Turkey is given in this very article!) error #2 the assumption that the early trees had thick shells (They may well have, or they may have needed to develop progressively thicker shells when their fruit eaters started experimenting with gravel filled gizzards)
“Extinction of Dodo Bird threatens tree species”
No shit?
You drew the wrong conclusion. The tree could very well be 360 million years old, and the Dodo 65 million. The necessarily did not have to come into being at the same time. If the turkey can digest seeds in the same way as the dodo, then there was probably anther bird (or dinosaur) now extinct, who could do the same.
Trying to use this as a condemnation and refutation of evolution is the mark of an idiot grasping at straws.
The Mauritians will have to start celebrating Thanksgiving...
This is a blatant misrepresentation!
The Dodo was not dependent upon the Tambalocoque for nourishment; Tambalocoque seeds were but one component of its diet.
One possible scenario is that a precursor of the Dodo (or even some entirely different animal) supplemented its diet with seeds from a precursor of the Tambalacoque - whose seeds were initially not especially dependent upon passage through an alimentary canal for germination.
Gradually, the ancestor of the Tambalacoque developed seeds with tougher and tougher epicarps. It thus became more and more dependent upon mechanical pre-treatment for germination. Perhaps it was only then that the Dodo's interest in the Tambalacoque seeds "took off."
Are the people who wrote this article really as stupid as they seem - or is it more nefarious than that? Are they perhaps trying to mislead and deceive their readers?
Regards,
Perhaps the lesson is that some species deserve to go extinct.
Take the Panda, for example.
Big and fat, giving birth to tiny offspring that are accidentally crushed by their mothers at an alarming rate.
Too antisocial and ill-tempered to tolerate one another, even long enough to breed.
In a world with thousands of bamboo species they will eat only seven.
All that tells me this species does not make the cut to go to the next round.
Don’t question your religious blogger overlords.
Or a blogger. :-)
The article only says the tree was dependent on the bird, not visa versa
I think that is why the language of the article is soft. It doesn’t say “THIS IF PROOF AGAINST EVOLUTION.” Instead, it says “this presents some potential problems for evolution.”
yes. only valid conclusion is that the Dodo was the LAST (until the Turkey was introduced) creature to have a symbiotic relationship with the tree.
Yeah, that’s probably the reason...
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