Darwinists here seem to be pretty sure that they can tell apart skulls of marsupial and placental wolfs:
arachnophilia writes:
yes. marsupials ARE more similar to each other than to their similar-looking placental counterpart. it might not be obvious from tiny pictures of the living animal, but the internal anatomy is a dead give-away.
PaulK writes:
No, you don't have to be an expert if you get a good look at the teeth. I can easily tell them apart. You would need a little specialised knowledge to know which is which - but only a little. The differences are obvious and anyobdy should be able to see them.
I dare say that if you don't know dental formulas by heart you will
not tell them apart let say after one year seeing them again lateral. I can support my view by Richard Dawkins observation:
quote:
Zoology students at Oxford had to identify 100 zoological specimens as part of the final exam. Word soon got around that, if ever a 'dog' skull was given, it was safe to identify it as Thylacinus on the grounds that anything as obvious as a dog skull had to be a catch. Then one year the examiners, to their credit, double bluffed and put in a real dog skull. The easiest way to tell the difference is by the two prominent holes in the palate bone, which are characteristic of marsupials generally.
Yet folks here are better experts than Oxford students of Zoology.
The skull of thylacinus is btw. more similar to fox than to wolf:
The Tasmanian tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus, is more similar in skull shape to the red fox, Vulpes vulpes, than to the placental wolf, Canis lupus.
CSIRO PUBLISHING | Australian Journal of Zoology
What surprised me also is thylacinus stripes on it's back, the form of which is "remarkably similar" of Afrikan Zebra duiker.
http://www.naturalworlds.org/...oducing/tasmanian_wolf_1.htm
Such stripe pattern is as striking as similarity of marsupial and placental wolfs skulls. One would say that the animal was compounded of many different patterns like platypus.
Darwinists tend as usually to explain the striking similarity of stripe pattens between thylacinus and Zebra duiker "LIKELY due to similar types of habitat".
Of course marsupial wolf is predator what is not the case of Zebra.
And marsupial wolfs hunted during night so I am not sure who enjoyed their strips. Problem is obviously much more complicated and going far beyond darwinian standard story explanations.