1, Giant Pandas
To date, the giant pandas, which are almost on the verge of extinction in more than 200 countries and regions all over the world, can only be found in the deep forests of Sichuan, Shaanxi and parts of Gansu in China. The total number of pandas in the world is now just under 1,000, and the number is constantly decreasing.
In zoology, pandas belong to the order Carnivora. Pandas are taxonomically part of the mammalian order Carnivora, but their diet is highly specialized, making them vegetarians who live on bamboo. Giant pandas eat bamboo, but they also love water. Most pandas live near streams and rivers, so they can drink from the water nearby. Giant pandas are gentle and generally do not actively attack people or other animals. Giant pandas' vision is extremely underdeveloped.
2, Chinese sturgeon
Also known as sturgeon, the national level of protection of animals. Belong to the cartilaginous hard scale fish, body long pike-shaped, the kiss of the plow-shaped, the tip of the kiss pointed, slightly upward. Mouth inferior, into a horizontal column, the mouth of the front of the long short whiskers. Eyes tiny, behind the eyes on both sides of the head, each with a crescent-shaped spout, the whole body is clad with prismatic bone plate five lines.
The Chinese sturgeon has a long history of more than 100 million years, so old fish has not much. From it can see some traces of biological evolution, so it is known as the living fossil in water biology, has a high scientific research value.
The Chinese sturgeon is a large migratory fish, the largest individual can reach 400-500 kilograms. Normally, the Chinese sturgeon inhabits the coastal continental shelf zone from the west coast of North Korea in the north to the southeast coast of China in the south. After living in the ocean for 9-18 years, the gonadal development is close to maturity, it will migrate to the Yangtze River in groups, arriving in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in Sichuan Yibin area and the lower Jinsha River to breed.
3. Horseshoe crab
The horseshoe crab's ancestors appeared in the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, when dinosaurs hadn't yet risen to prominence, and primitive fish had just been introduced, but it was one of the oldest animals on the planet, and was known as a living fossil. People have found the horseshoe crab 500 million years ago after the fossilization, it and the long-extinct trilobites but relatives. Some people also call it horseshoe crabs, in fact, it has nothing to do with crabs, but with scorpions, spiders have relatives. Horseshoe crabs are arthropods of the class Sword-tailed Animals, existing three genera and four species, distributed in the Americas and some Asian coasts. China south of the Yangtze River mouth east, the South China Sea coast, Guangxi coast and other places have their figure. Horseshoe crab with the passage of time, and its contemporaries or evolution, or extinction, but only the horseshoe crab from more than 400 million years ago to date still retains its original and ancient appearance, so horseshoe crabs have a "living fossil," the name.
The body of the horseshoe crab is divided into three parts: the largest part is the cephalothorax, followed by a segmented abdomen, and then a long, sharp tail spine. It has a pair of compound eyes on the side of the cephalothorax, each of which is made up of several smaller eyes. It has been discovered that the compound eyes of the horseshoe crab have a phenomenon of lateral suppression, which means that they can make the image of an object clearer, and this principle has been applied to television and radar systems to improve the clarity of television imaging and the sensitivity of radar displays. For this reason, this hundreds of millions of years of obscurity of the ancient animals jumped into the modern bionics in a fascinating "star". There is also a single pair of eyes that sense ultraviolet light. They also have a pair of pincers, called chelicerae, which are specialized for feeding on worms and thin-shelled mollusks. They can swim dorsally, but generally prefer to burrow and crawl in the mud. Horseshoe crabs don't grow very fast; they shed their skin 16 times and take 9 to 12 years to reach maturity. Horseshoe crabs have long been used as food by humans, and their meat, gonads and eggs are all edible. However, their blood contains high levels of copper, which can lead to poisoning. Horseshoe crab blood can be used as a medical reagent.
The blood of the horseshoe crab contains copper ions, and its blood is blue. An extract of this blue blood, the "horseshoe crab reagent", can accurately and quickly detect whether the internal tissues of the human body are diseased due to bacterial infections; it can be used to monitor toxin contamination in the pharmaceutical and food industries.
Whenever the horseshoe crab breeding season in spring and summer, once the male and female are married, they will be inseparable, and the fat female horseshoe crab often carries her thin husband and waddles. At this time to catch a horseshoe crab, up is a pair of horseshoe crabs, so horseshoe crabs enjoy the "seabed mandarin ducks" of the beauty of the name.
4. Platypus
Platypus is an oviparous mammal, family Platypus. The mouth is flat and protruding, like a duck's beak, covered with animal hair, hence the name. The feet have five webbed toes. Like a bird like eggs, and like mammals to feed their young, but the mother does not have nipples, only the secretion of mammary glands of the small holes, the young from the mother's abdominal surface of the moistened hair to lick the milk, the platypus can snorkeling, often built the nest in the swamps or the banks of the river, the hole opened in the underwater. When feeding, it dives underwater and uses its beak to explore the mud for shellfish, worms and small crustaceans. It is native to southern Australia and Tasmania, and inhabits semi-aquatic and semi-terrestrial environments. Since Australia was separated from other continents about 200 million years ago and isolated on the southern hemisphere's oceans, natural conditions were homogenous and animal evolution was slow. The platypus is one of the animals that still preserves ancient and low-grade characteristics, making it a unique and rare animal in Australia. This is important for the study of animal evolution and geographical distribution.
The platypus is an extant and ancient mammal. Although it is not the ancestor of mammals, it has an important position in the history of animal evolution. The platypus has a hairy body and feeds its offspring with milk, which has the characteristics of mammals; the platypus reproduces in an oviparous way, which is also like a reptile. Therefore, it can be used as one of the evidence that mammals evolved from reptiles, and is called the living fossil of the animal kingdom
5. Nautilus
Ancient cephalopods - Nautilus (Figure)
2006-3-28 Reads:1317
Nautilus body left and right symmetrical, the back of the birth of a similar to the crown snail, snails and other gastropods, can be completely protected by the body of the limestone shell. The shell is very large, up to 20 centimeters in diameter, and the mouth of the shell is about 8 centimeters long, although it is not curled from side to side, but along a plane from the back to the ventral side of the curls, slightly spiral, without a conch roof. The color of the shell is also very beautiful, the exterior is smoother, grayish white or light yellowish brown, interspersed with 15-30 orange-red, maroon or tawny wavy horizontal lines, the silver-white layer of pearls is very thick, the inner surface of the pearl luster is extremely beautiful, it is really a natural work of art.
The umbilical aperture of the nautilus is either open or closed. Inside the shell from the shell center to the mouth of the shell, separated by a curved diaphragm into many shell chambers, the number of which increases with the growth of the nautilus. The last shell chamber of the largest volume, its body in which it resides, so it is called "living room", the other empty shell chamber *** more than 30, a smaller volume, can store air, called the "air chamber". Each diaphragm has a small hole in the center, by the series of tubes will be linked to the shell chamber. The air in the chamber of air regulation, can make it float in the sea, its role is very similar to the squid "cuttlebone". The latest research suggests that the nautilus slowly discharges liquid from the shell chambers through the localized osmosis of the tubes, reducing the weight of the body and making it float, and then the pressure around it presses the seawater back into the shell chambers, increasing the weight of the body and causing it to sink, just like a small submarine.
Nautilus distribution range is narrower, only live in the tropical ocean, mainly distributed in the east from Samoa Islands, west to Kalimantan Island, the north from the Philippine Islands, Rengaing Bay, south of Australia's Sydney between the southwest Pacific Ocean. Our country only in Taiwan, Hainan Island, the Xisha Islands and Nansha Islands waters have been found floating with the current of the empty shells, has not yet been picked up live.
Nautilus is the oldest existing, the lowest level of cephalopods, cephalopods in the Paleozoic Silurian strata in the species of special prosperity, up to more than 3,500 species, they have different shapes of shells, but the vast majority of species have been extinct, survival to date only nautilus, large umbilical nautilus and broad umbilical nautilus and so on the three kinds, so called "living fossil! So it is called "living fossil", which is an important material for the study of animal evolution and ancient ecology, ancient climatology. Therefore, our country will nautilus listed as a national class I protected animals.
December 12, 1938, in the South African town of East London Harbour, a fishing boat, a young girl working in the local museum Latimer carefully pick and choose marine life specimens, suddenly her eyes lit up, a biology of the last century, the most legendary marine adventure story opened the prelude.
What excited Ms. Latimer was a strange fish with a compelling blue glow all over its body. Unlike all extant fish, this one is covered in hard scales and has fleshy limb-like fins that are very reminiscent of the limbs of terrestrial vertebrates.
Latimay took the fish back to the museum and asked for an identification, but no one recognized it, and Dr. Smith, the museum's visiting ichthyologist, happened to be away on vacation. As the beautiful blue color of the fish's body began to fade to brown in the hot, humid South African weather on Christmas Eve, the question of how to preserve the strange fish, which was about 1.5 meters long, became a tricky one. The only refrigeration facilities in town large enough to hold the fish were the morgue and the food freezer. Latimai's pleas for help were politely refused, and he had no choice but to find a small amount of formalin and wrap the fish in newspaper to slow down the deterioration.
Twelve days later, Latimer's letter finally reached Smith. Through the rough sketch drawn by Latimer, Smith immediately recognized that this is a class of fish living in the ancient times - the empty spiny fish, they are about 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs went extinct, and people's understanding of them is limited to the fragmentary records left on the rocks. Smith couldn't believe his judgment and immediately telegraphed to Latimer to take careful care of the specimen. Still, the worst Smith feared had happened. The blue monster fish had become a flayed specimen, retaining only its skin and internal skeleton, while its internal organs and tissues had been dumped as garbage in the Indian Ocean.
Sketch of the first Latimer fish by Miss Latimer. With this drawing, Smith determined that the fish was "back from the dead.
The fish was later named the Latimer fish. The story of the fish's "resurrection" soon made waves around the world, and the British journal Nature opened its coverage of the discovery with a quote from the ancient Roman museumer Pliny: "Africa is always discovering new things.
The first Latimer was caught just outside the mouth of the Charonne River in South Africa, where the water is about 70 meters deep. The Smiths spent 14 years searching for the second fish, visiting all the small fishing villages on the east coast of Africa and offering rewards, and in 1952, on Christmas Eve, the fish finally reappeared in the Comoros. In order to get this fish as soon as possible, Smith even alarmed the then Prime Minister of South Africa, using military helicopters, and finally almost caused a dispute between South Africa and France, because the Comoros was a French colony at that time. Later, nearly two hundred more were caught in Comorian waters. 1997 in Indonesia, half a world away from the Comoros, the Latimer fish was once again discovered by chance by a young American on his honeymoon, Erdmann, and the geographical distribution of the Latimer fish has become a new mystery to be solved.
Why the Latimer is called a "living fossil":
About 410-380 million years ago, the highest-ranking animals on the planet were fleshy-finned fish that roamed the water. Tetrapods, including humans, evolved from these fish. Carnivorous fishes belong to two separate subclasses of the order Scleractinia, along with the diverse and numerous species of spiny fishes. Although directly related to the origin of tetrapods, carnivorous fishes are very limited in number. Prior to the discovery of the Latimer fish, we knew of only three species of lungfish that lived in the Southern Hemisphere, with all other information coming from the fossil record. Hollow spines are a very conservative clade of carnivorous fishes, and their body shape has hardly changed much in the long history of evolution. That's why Smith was able to identify the Latimer fish as a nudibranch based on a sketch and called it a "living fossil.
Oceanic "living fossils"
The oceans have been home to millions of marine animals since the dawn of time. There are many marine animals due to changes in the Earth's environment or by land and sea changes and extinct as a "fossil" There is also a class of marine animals in the ancient ocean appeared, and then disappeared, not found for a long time, people mistakenly believe that they have already been extinct on Earth, but later on was found, people call these animals "living fossil" animals, but the "living fossil" animals in the ocean, the "living fossil" animals in the ocean. They are called "living fossil" animals. Another class of animals, they adapt to the environment can be very strong, in the ancient ocean there, but to this day there is not much change, still maintain the original, so people also call this type of animal "living fossil" animals.
As the arthropods of the trilobites, about 600 million years ago in the Cambrian period, a large number of breeding in the ocean for about 160 million years, since then, from ancient times to the present day on the earth has never been found on the traces of this is known to have been extinct "fossil" animals.
A sea lily with a flower-like body belonging to the echinoderms fluttered in the ancient oceans 340 million years ago, but it disappeared and was thought to be extinct. However, a living specimen was found in 1873, and since then it has been found one after another, and the sea lily has been called a "living fossil". animal.
Another example is the Danish "armor shrimp" marine survey ship in Costa Rica at a depth of 3450 meters to catch 10 and ancient snails or cape shells closely related to the animal, named "armor shrimp pro cape shells" is also known as "living fossil" animals. The vessel also caught a hooked shrimp (Arthropoda) on the continental slope of Kenya on the east coast of Africa, which is also a "living fossil" animal.
There is also a class of animals such as the ancient brachiopods of the sea bean sprouts and arthropods of the phylum limb stomatopods of the Chinese horseshoe crabs, they are as early as more than 400 million years ago, the Devonian period has been introduced so far polarization mold has not changed, people also call them "living fossil" animals.
In the chiropterans, there is a kind of living in more than 300 million years ago of the bony fish - spear-tailed fish, is thought to be in tens of millions of years ago has been extinct, however, in 1938, in the southeast coast of South Africa, from 150-400 meters of the depths of the sea for the first time to catch a live one, immediately sensational the world, and then in South Africa's Comoros Islands waters have been captured in a row to a number of, this world's rare prehistoric, the world's rare prehistoric horseshoe crab. The reappearance of this rare prehistoric fish, the albacore, which is called a "living fossil" animal is true to its name.
The Cretaceous period was the era of reptiles, and the earth was vibrating under the feet of dinosaurs; there was a 7.6-meter-long Arthrosaurus in the sea, and there was a Pterodactylus in the air that spread its wings up to 8.2 meters wide. By the end of the Cretaceous period, all of these creatures were extinct, but the Loch Ness Monster, known as the "sea serpent," was claimed in the 1970s, and may have been the descendant of one of the dinosaurs.
In April 1976, a Japanese fishing boat caught a 2,000-kilogram, 9-meter-long animal with a 1.5-meter-long neck, a 1.8-meter-long tail, and four flippers in a 305-meter-deep net in New Zealand waters. The carcass was subsequently thrown away, but based on photographs and drawings made at the time, paleontologists believe that the mysterious animal carcass may have been a snake-necked dragon, a reptile that flourished more than 100 million years ago. This suggests that this "living fossil" still lives in the depths of the oceans.
With the continuous development of modern science and technology, scientists are exploring the world of the deep sea, and more "living fossil" animals will be discovered in the world's oceans.
Of course, there are also sequoias, platypus, kangaroos, you can check Baidu Knowledge to see their profiles
.