Here are my answers and I suspect they are different from yours.
- A plant eater with large ears that allow it to hear sneaky
predatory and long hind legs adapted for hopping away from the
predator once detected. Bandicoot
- An "arboreal glider" - a mammal that uses membranes
along the sides of its body to glide from tree to tree. Glider
- A worm eater with paddle like arms adapted for digging so
it can tunnel easily through the soil. Marsupial Mole
- An ant and termite eater that has evolved a long sticky tongue
to pick up its insect prey and a thick fur to protect it from
being bitten by these insects. Numbat
All of the animals I listed are marsupial mammals from Australia.
Don't worry about what is a marsupial mammal. That isn't important
for the point I am trying to make. And my point is this - there
are many organisms that have evolved similar appearances due to
similar lifestyles and these are analogous similarities.
The bandicoot looks very similar to a rabbit because of converging
evolution - they share similar lifestyles and have evolved
similar mechanisms. Bandicoots and rabbits are mammalian analogs.
There are other mammalian analogs; gliders and flying squirrels,
marsupial moles and "ordinary" moles, and numbats and
anteaters.
Here's an interesting and important fact - all marsupials
are more closely related to each other than to any other mammals.
That means bandicoots, gliders, marsupial moles and numbats are
more closely related to each other than they are to their analogs
"ordinary" mammals.
Thousands of years ago Aristotle tried to make sense of the complex
world of nature by classifying it all based on analogous similarities.
Here's a list of animals. Place them into three groups based upon
analogous similarities (and, in effect, follow in Aristotle's
footprints).
bats
butterflies
cattle
cod
dogs
dolphins
elephants
goldfish
hawks
mice
mosquitoes
trout
Here's my answer...
This work was created by Dr Jamie Love and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
If you like, you can return to the Home Page.