300 Million Year Old Fossil Fish Likely Had Color Vision 37
westlake writes Nature is reporting the discovery of mineralized rods and cones in a 300-million-year-old fossil fish found in Kansas. The soft tissues of the eye and brain decay rapidly after death, within 64 days and 11 days, respectively, and are almost never preserved in the fossil record — making this the first discovery of fossil rods and cones in general and the first evidence for color vision in a fossilized vertebrate eye.
That's all well and good.. (Score:1)
...but was it 4K?
Re:That's all well and good.. (Score:4, Interesting)
...but was it 4K?
Well, I don't know about that, but at least it was better than Oculus Rift, if images in TFA are anything to go by. Something like semi-spherical 320 by 240 degrees with 3D zone of maybe 120 by 240 degrees in the middle, or thereabouts.
Also, it's not just the vision, the display system goes with lateral twin ultra low bass audio arrays, capable of generating fully spherical acoustic environment awareness experience.
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20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair separated by 1 arc-minute. So at 2 pixels per minute, your 320x240 degree angle of view translates into 38,400 x 28,800 pixels.
The human eye gets away with it because only a tiny amount of the center of yo
Re: That's all well and good.. (Score:1)
Oh.... Is that why I keep finding these off-topic rants in the middle of all the irrelevant commentary? For a second I thought that you were God and I was just the schizophrenic imaginary remnant of your 40 day hangover.
Say, can you tell me where all the decent conversationalists that used to hang out here have gone?
Re:That's all well and good.. (Score:5, Funny)
sorry the dates are wrong .... (Score:1, Troll)
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My sarcasm detector is intact. Alas, that doesn't always guarantee that I've mod points when I see that someone else's is disabled.
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I'm a died in the wool evolutionist
Now that's belief in evolution! Not like those half-hearted evolutionists who are only dyed in the wool. Even if they're dyed in colour.
Re:sorry the dates are wrong .... (Score:4, Insightful)
The first person to moderate usually sets the tone, and later mods use less critical thinking.
To offset, it would have to be worthy of one mod point. As this reply is predictable, it seems unworthy especially on a low comment count article.
As a troll post, this does state an insincerely held belief solely to get a response. You expected funny perhaps, but troll mod is therefore not totally inappropriate.
Understanding primacy and anchoring doesn't undo moderation, so just enjoy that anyone bothered to reply.
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The you advocate eliminating this 'survivor gene.' simply because it allows someone to survive
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There have been extraordinary advances in our understanding of science and technology in just the last few hundred years. We can now do something effective about disease, drought, and the like. It's now counterproductive to expend the energy on worshiping an extreme being in hopes that they will resolve these things -- that energy would be better spent addressing the problem with science or engineering.
Unfortunately, religion brings with it irrational behavior that disrupts society. Consider the Crusades or
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Humans, for good ecological reasons, seem to want to create a "supreme being".
Humans are social creature who identify with their community, and create metaphors for their political and/or social and/or natural context. It doesn't matter what a metaphor is, only what it represents.
Content? (Score:1)
It'll have to go (Score:2)
the real mystery (to me) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the real mystery (to me) (Score:5, Informative)
... I'm hard pressed to believe that there is an advantage for colorblindness that would have been selected for in the earliest mammals.
There didn't have to be an advantage for partial colorblindness (they were never totally colorblind), there just doesn't have to be any penalty for the trait to be lost. Same with the inability of some mammals to synthesize vitamin C, no particular advantage to losing it, but with a vitamin C rich diet there was no penalty either and so it could get lost over time. Color vision only works in bright light. Mammals spent a lot of their early evolutionary history as nocturnal creatures, and so could lose this trait without penalty. In fact it appears there were multiple function S cone loss events in the mammalian line [royalsocie...ishing.org], not just one (genomics gives us powerful insights into this today). The article does point out though that "the fact that these gene mutations have spread throughout the populations allows the possibility that the loss of S cones may in some way enhance visual fitness". It is entirely possible that processing of images in dim light could be better optimized through evolution with the loss of the unneeded bright-light color vision baggage.
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Same with the inability of some mammals to synthesize vitamin C, no particular advantage to losing it, but with a vitamin C rich diet there was no penalty either and so it could get lost over time.
Wait, as far as I know the disadvantage of vitamin C synthesis is that it consumes glucose. Humans needed all the glucose that they could get for the brain, and there was enough vitamin C in the food, so they got rid of the converting bacteria.
Re:the real mystery (to me) (Score:4, Informative)
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Slow down, cowboy. (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, early fish could see in colors. And clearly modern birds (and their dino ancestors) can see in color
The mineralized rods and cones in this fossil fish are the first to be found in any vertebrate fossil. The argument for color vision in dinosaurs is more or less based on the theory that if a sexually attractive feather-like structure was colored, a dino must have seen it in color.
A fossil that can see?!?!? (Score:1)
Man, science is getting weird!