Dragaera

evoluton

Howard Brazee howard at brazee.net
Tue Nov 23 10:20:45 PST 2004

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 13:01:15 -0500, Joy Jennifer Nicholson  
<jjnichol at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> While I appear to be wrong as far as jhereg, there do still remain a  
> number of
> Dragaeran species with 6 limbs.  A friend and I postulated that 6 limbed  
> creatures
> were those that were native to Dragaera, while the 4 limbed ones were  
> imports
> from the "small invisible stars".  However the example of the jhereg and  
> the
> serioli seem to contradict this.
> Still, I think it would be interesting to compare leggedness among those  
> creatures
> on which we can speculate.  Different number of limbs lead to questions  
> of relatedness and evolution.
> here's a short list of creatures in each group, off the top of my head  
> and without
> having the time to dig through my books atm.  Perhaps someone can add  
> more to it?

Interesting - we have species with different numbers of legs - but  
mammals, reptiles and birds don't vary much (snakes & seals even have the  
bone structure).   We have to move further off the evolutionary scale to  
find crutacians and insects (not to mention fish).

While 6 legged creatures wouldn't be related to Earth creatures, we do  
know that there has been some gene splicing (or something), between  
species - even between creatures from various planets.   And jhereg is one  
of the species that has been modified.

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