Is it possible that some prehistoric creatures survived?
127043
Birds are the direct descendents of dinosaurs.  Many scientists will say they *are* dinosaurs.  As such, they are alive, so dinosaurs are alive.\n\nWhile it remains possible that some dinosaurs proper have survived, it is extremely unlikely at this point.  There is no physical evidence for it.\n\nYour second question is difficult to answer.  Are there prehistoric creatures that have survived?  Sure!  Pretty much every species on earth today (even humans!) is older than history, that makes it prehistoric!  Defining prehistoric any other way would essentially make prehistoric mean "not surviving today", so the answer would be no.\n\nWhat you mean, of course, is creatures to have survived from truly ancient times, such as from the Mesozoic (age of dinosaurs) or older, but again, it's difficult to answer.  There probably aren't any actual species that old, but it's difficult to tell if something in the fossil record is actually the same species as something alive today.  Consider, lions and tigers look and act very different alive and are certainly two different species, but it is very difficult to tell their skeletons apart.\n\nA lot of so-called "living fossils" really aren't.  For instance, we have no fossils of the Coelacanth.  It's closest relatives in the fossil record are in another family (as different as cats and dogs).  Cockroaches are often said to have been unchanged for millions of years, but it's not the case as the fossil record records them evolving continuously.  The first fossil cockroaches had three pairs of wings!\n\nBut some things have survived nearly unchanged for millions of years.  Six-gill and Port Jackson sharks are very much like they were in the age of dinosaurs.  The Tuatara is surprisingly like it's Mesozoic relatives.\n\nBut the king of living fossils is the Lingula brachiopod.  It looks like a clam and lives by filter feeding, but don't let it's calm appearance fool you.  These little guys are survivors.  They've been living in Earth's oceans almost unchanged for 550 million years!  That's almost as long as we have animal fossils at all!  Dinosaurs are hardly teenagers by comparison!\n\nAddenda:  The Komodo Dragon is NOT believed to be a dinosaur, at least not by scientists.  It is just a large monitor lizard.  Dinosaurs are not lizards, being classed among the Archosaurs with the crocodiles, pterosaurs and birds.
415097
Ok well, firstly evolution is not my religion and the sole purpose for my existence. Wouldn't be the end of the world if it's not true, though I may lose a lot of my love of nature.\n\nWell... fossils can show that there were creatures similar to creatures we have today (but not the same) that are extinct now. \n\nSkeletons of neanderthal and homo erectus species have been found also, showing that beings very similar to humans have existed and then become extinct. By seeing the brow ridge on these skulls, and the different shape (but without damage and cracking) it is plain to see that these were not skulls bashed in or damaged in any way. \n\nWe also share genes with many other animals and plants. \n\nWe can also see stars billions of light years away. If the planet was only approx 6000 yrs old the light would not have reached the earth yet.\n\nIf you put nutrients in water in a vacuum, amino acids begin to form (I do not know the exact primeval soup experiement, but according to scientists, considering how quickly the amino acids formed, cells could reasonably be believed to form given the millions of yrs this earth has existed.) \n\nAlso, look at our skeletons! Many animals are linked to one another in bone structure etc. Look at a horses legs now - the chestnuts (hardened lumps) used to be their toes but are of no use now, halfway up their legs! Though you may say that is micro-evolution, I disagree. If we had a 6-toed, 3-toed, 4-toed or even 2-toed horselike animal today, I think it would be considered a different species.\n\nHowever, in the end, no one will believe what you tell them to - it is a choice. Christians believed in geocentric astronomy years after copernicus proved our galaxy to be heliocentric. The Bible mentions holding the corners of the world and tossing off sinners and suchlike - if it is G-d's word, surely he would've made it clear that the world was round?\n\nHope you're having a good day, you're asking politely :)\n\nx
551851
I don't put my faith in scientists. The same scientists say that the Earth is billions of years old and then they change the dates over and over. The truth is that no one really knows, how could they? Scientists said that certain fish died off millions of years ago, but they pull up fish off the coast of Madagascar that should have been extinct. I don't trust scientists because they claim to have facts when in reality they are theories.
80774
It seems that anthropologists have bones of austropethicus and ape-like people like the bones of an ape person called "Lucy" The skull cavity was for a large brain but the bone structures were more ape like than human like. There was neanderthal man which was believed to have been exterminated by homo erectus. Also homo habilis. I'm really not sure if people wiped out some smart ape people or if those bones are supposed to be us. But I personally believe humans are not apes. If anything I believe people are more closely related to bears than apes, though genetically speaking I'd be laughed at for that assertion.
298767
Yes, the earliest life appears to be aquatic life.  But then amphibian species emerged on land (although with part of their lifespan still in water), and later reptiles were all-land-dwelling animals.  Among these are snakes.  Snakes are reptiles, so therefore, yes they did evolve on land. (Incidentally, they evolved from legged-animals ... some snakes still have vestigial leg bones).\n\nSo I'm not sure what your question is.
265534
I think so. At least at somepoint in their history anyway - they will have had predators, or illnesses that they could not fight, and so the fittest or more suited to survival will have survived, and the 'weaker' will have perished. It could be argued that if they are advanced then natural selection would apply less. For example humans don't really have any predators, and through medical intervention we can stop many ailments that would otherwise kill us: If a lion was born with an inherited disease which affected their mobility then they wouldn't survive for very long in the wild, and neither would a neandarthal human, but modern day humans could lead a full life with such an ailment.
31349
Probably not.  However, it is not - contrary to popular belief - uncommon for us to find mamals, sometimes large mamals, of a new species even to this day.  Case in point, although Homo sapiens (human beings) were long considered to be the only surving species of the Homo genus, many scientists are taking southeast Asian stories of 'harry little cave dwelling men' seriously and now some believe that an entire seperate species of the Homo genus may have been coexisting with humans as late as the 17th century in some places. So it is possible for large animals to go simply undedected.
38767
>>>>>They have never found any.\n\nThere are many transitional fossils.\n\n\nThe only way that the claim of their absence may be remotely justified, aside from ignoring the evidence completely, is to redefine "transitional" as referring to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and a direct descendant of another. However, direct lineages are not required; they could not be verified even if found. What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.\n\nTransitional fossils may coexist with gaps. We do not expect to find finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years. Nevertheless, we do find several fine gradations of fossils between species and genera, and we find many other sequences between higher taxa that are still very well filled out.\n\nThe following are fossil transitions between species and genera:\n\n   1. Human ancestry. There are many fossils of human ancestors, and the differences between species are so gradual that it is not always clear where to draw the lines between them.\n\n   2. The horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) appear in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence. Other head and neck features also evolved. These features are adaptations for head-on ramming analogous to sheep behavior (Stanley 1974).\n\n   3. A gradual transitional fossil sequence connects the foraminifera Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (Pearson et al. 1997). O. universa, the later fossil, features a spherical test surrounding a "Globigerinoides-like" shell, showing that a feature was added, not lost. The evidence is seen in all major tropical ocean basins. Several intermediate morphospecies connect the two species, as may be seen in the figure included in Lindsay (1997).\n\n   4. The fossil record shows transitions between species of Phacops (a trilobite; Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil; Eldredge 1972; 1974; Strapple 1978).\n\n   5. Planktonic forminifera (Malmgren et al. 1984). This is an example of punctuated gradualism. A ten-million-year foraminifera fossil record shows long periods of stasis and other periods of relatively rapid but still gradual morphologic change.\n\n   6. Fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia are very common (they are mined as diatomaceous earth), and they show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a record of a speciation event (Miller 1999, 44-45).\n\n   7. Lake Turkana mollusc species (Lewin 1981).\n\n   8. Cenozoic marine ostracodes (Cronin 1985).\n\n   9. The Eocene primate genus Cantius (Gingerich 1976, 1980, 1983).\n\n  10. Scallops of the genus Chesapecten show gradual change in one "ear" of their hinge over about 13 million years. The ribs also change (Pojeta and Springer 2001; Ward and Blackwelder 1975).\n\n  11. Gryphaea (coiled oysters) become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic (Hallam 1968).
56002
The only planet we know of that has life is earth. Based on that very limited knowledge we can only estimate that earthlike life forms would have had great difficulty evolving in the worlds, in and out of the solarsystem, that we know of today (new planets are discovered almost daily). It is probably possible for terrestrial organisms to survive and maybe even prosper if introduced to some shielded and protected water rich enironments on the other worlds described above but there is a great difference between merely surviving and evolving. Life requires very special environments and conditions for a very long period of time, hundreds of millions of years, to evolve. We cant say for sure that those conditions were ever present on any world other than earth. But once life is born on a world it is extremely hard to extinguish completely as it would constantly evolve to adapt to changing environments. Life has nearly ended on earth many times as environments changed but has always bounced back. So if there was life on any other world in our solarsystem it would be so plentiful by now that we would have found traces of it in their atmospheres or in their soils. But we havent.
275481
Yes there are.  They have been here for thousands of years.  Some come and go, others stay.  Two such species look almost exactly like us because they are believed to be the ones who actually "created" us.  You should read the Earth Chronicles written by a group of archaeologists.  It  better explains it than I can in such a short space.  There are 7 books total beginning with "The 12th Planet" by Zecharia Sitchen.
513207
its a myth but i believe it..\n\nthey're fire breathing dinos..\n\ni wish i could see one..\n\nand they can fly, and swim too..
446784
Pre-Cambrian life was mostly soft-bodied -- there were very few if any creatures with bones, skeletons, or hard shells, so there were very few fossils left.\n\nBesides, it was a long, long time ago -- and geological activity on the earth (volcanic action, subduction of continental plates, erosion, etc.) have wiped out a lof of what was the surface of the earth then. :)
502688
Natural selection.  Since competition was low, and food was so abundant...the bigger the better.  Also, if you were bigger you could kill smaller things or defend yourself from something that wanted to eat you.  Mammals were favored to remain small during that time because competition would have been too high with all the huge dinosaurs around.  After they died out, mammals had a free world to investigate, and some of them got very large as a result. (Mammoth, Mastadon, Rhinocerous, Giant Ground Sloth, etc.)  It's all about evolution.
230367
No, but some theories must confirm it now. The best theory is that there are water on Mars long ago. That may prov that there is life on mars. The problem is, it's not proven yet, and other theories are here.\n\nBut remember, every life in a planet starts with water, so maybe, bacteria evolved into sea animals because of water, then to reptiles, to animals, monkeys, and so on.
4287
Technically dinosaurs were not even known to have exist until the first evidence was discovered in either the 18th or 19th century. In the book of Genesis note: not to be interepted literally!! It states ( after the life in the sea,animals on land) Sorry I can't quote exactly however; look at all the animals that exist. The Bible would be a LONG book!
216911
Dinosaurs actually lived preceding bible time and their remains are a decently sized loophole of the book. Comedien Bill Hicks once referenced the topic when he offered a fictional conversation between himself and a believer in bible time. It was a one word question and read: "Dinosaurs?"\n\nBy the way, there were no Dinosaurs at the time of Noah's arc.
569645
yes.\n\nthey are mammals and do not breathe underwater.\n\nthey take in air at the surface, so it does not matter what type of water they live in.