|
How did nature create tigers?
To understand this we have to go back in time millions and millions
of years ago.
It was generally believed by many people that life began suddenly
on Earth at 9.00 a.m. on Sunday, October 23, in 5,004 B.C.! We now
know better. But there are still many gaps in our knowledge of who
we are and how our fellow creatures and we came to be. Such questions
continue to fascinate us and as each generation finds newer answers
to old questions, the theory of evolution itself continues to evolve
and take clearer shape.
Evolution. Before Charles Robert Darwin presented us with his theory
of how existing life forms came to be, evolution and 'natural selection'
were virtually unheard of. The earliest bacteria fed only on various
carbon compounds, but later some bacteria began making their own
food within their cell walls, using energy from the sun for the
process (photosynthesis). This is how plants came to be. Those bacteria
that could not manufacture their own food, continued to plunder
food from the environment. These became amoebas. Later, when multi-celled
organisms appeared, the seas were colonised by plant forms such
as seaweeds, and animal forms like sponges and jellyfish. Around
500 million years ago, the oceans were teeming with life. All the
sea animals we know today have directly descended from these early
forms, including crabs, starfish, snails and squid. At this time,
all of our planet's life forms had lived only in the sea. Plants
began to move to the land only after they developed waxy coverings
to prevent themselves from drying out. The earliest land plants
caused the once grey-brown Earth to turn green. Eventually, mosses,
ferns and liverworts provided sanctuaries for the first animals
that escaped from the sea - creatures that resembled the centipedes
and millipedes we see today. Unlikely as it sounds, these were the
ancestors of the many diverse life forms that we see around us on
Earth - elephants, frogs, snakes, tigers and humans!
top
Did you know?
- Tigers, and all cats - lions, panthers, jaguars, leopards -
evolved from a teeny squirrel-sized mammal that chased insects.
- Fossils provide clues about the evolution of the tiger. The
oldest fossil has been found from northern China and Java. These
show that the tiger evolved more than two million years ago and
before the divergence of the lion, leopard and jaguar.
- The tiger is believed to have entered India from Northern Asia
after the last Ice age.
- The oldest fossil remains of the tiger in India was discovered
at Karnool cave deposits in Andhra Pradesh, probably in the Pleistocene
age (more than 10,000 years B.P.).
- Tigers are not descendents of the sabretooth tiger. The sabretooth
belonged to a completely different species called Smilodon fatalis.
They were found all over the world around 35-40 million years
ago and became extinct around 10,000 years ago.
<< All About Tigers Main Page
|
