Re: Selective Extinction

[Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au>]

Michael wrote:
> 
> > From: Toby White <augwhite@neosoft.com>
> 
> > >There is some good evidence to suspect that Bovine Immunodeficiency
> Virus
> > >(BIV) infected cats ?5-10mya resulting in Feline Immunodeficiency Virus
> >
> > I'm not even going to *ask* how a sexually transmitted disease got from
> cows
> > to cats!  Lions lying down with lambs?
> 
> Well, obviously it wasn't sexually transmitted.  How large cats got
> infected is  unknown, but somehow an infected member of the Bovidae family
> infected an early member of the family Felidae.  Horses and zebra bite so
> maybe that's how it was transmitted from species to species and eventually
> infected the entire family of cats.  The domestic cat is now infected
> probably sometime in the last several thousand years, perhaps 1-2kya.

        A few years ago a horse trainer in Queensland, Australia, died
after contracting a disease from horses. There was also a scare
more recently where an Australian town was quarantined after someone
contracted a potentially fatal disease usually only known in birds.
Given the rapid reproduction rate of micro-organisms I suspect that
they have the ability to evolve faster than macro-organisms.
I wonder why people don't study evolution in microbes rather than
creatures like anole lizards? It probably wouldn't take 30 years to
show results.

-- 
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        Dann Pigdon
        Melbourne, Australia

        Dinosaur Reconstructions:
        http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/4459/
        Australian Dinosaurs:
        http://www.alphalink.com.au/~dannj
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