Friday, October 24, 2008

the animal that confused scientists




Sometimes God's imagination is so creative that even the Scientists are stumped by the results.One such example is the colugo,an animal that scientists tried to place in three different families before they finally gave up and designed a whole new family for just one strange creature.


Scientists agree that the colugo is a mammel.But beyond that,they're stumped.For a while they had classified the colugo as a bat,because it had a membrane that it uses for gliding.Bur upon closer inspection,it was clear that the colugo was not a bat.The colugo had both front and hind legs and a tail that are all used to stretch the membrane of the cat sized animal to a width of four feet.Based on this,scientists thought it might be a lemur with wings,so they classified the colugo as a primate. The strictly vegetarian colugo is not a lemur,however. So about 50 years ago,scientists decided to give the colugo its own classification-Dermoptera,meaning "skin wing."

Scientists classify animals according to an imagined evolutionary history-the most popular school of thought today. This doesn't prove evolution;it is simply arranging simular things together,just as kindergarten children do as they learn about different objects. But the colugo is such a testimony to God's imaginative creativity that scientists have not been able to find anything that even remotely resembles this strange and wonderful creature.

1 comment:

Scott Hamilton said...

Thank you for highlighting one of the best features of science: It learns. Thanks to genetic studies, we now know that the family is most closely related to tree shrews. There's no shame in being wrong based on the best information available. There is shame in continuing to be wrong after better information is found.

So, they fixed that bit in the Bible yet that says insects have four legs?

"Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind. But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you."

-Leviticus 11:22-23