This Furry Potato Is An Evolutionary Mystery

this furry potato looks an awful lot like a rodent it's got the general size and shape of your typical Marmet it has in sizers that keep growing for its entire life like a rodent and heck could those whiskers lie but at the mammal family reunion you won't find the hierra sitting by the groundhogs and the chinchillas of the world instead its closest relatives hint at something much weirder going on in its evolutionary history because its actual cousins are elephants and sea cows and we're not sure which is [Music] closer if you want to support the channel the bizar Beast pin Club is open for subscriptions for the whole month sign up by June 20th and the first pen you will get will be one of these incredible fuzzy potatoes and stick around for the end of the video for some bonus hierax facts there are six or seven extan species of hyraxes depending on who you ask and they can be found in the Middle East and throughout much of Africa they may look cute but they can sound truly horrible some HRA species are solitary and live in trees While others live socially in groups on rock outcrops and like a lot of animals their size they eat plants and bugs so far nothing really out of the ordinary here but before we get into their bizarre family tree we got to say that hyraxes have some noteworthy weirdness all their own as a dial species they can often be found basking in the Sun but this isn't just a comfort thing they're actually not great at regulating their internal body temperature so they need that extra solar boost to stay warm luckily they have an easy time climbing and clinging to nice sunny spots thanks to their suction cup feet the muscular structure of their foot pads combined with some fancy gland secretions help them grip onto surprisingly Steep and smooth surfaces hyraxes also don't eat like most other animals their front teeth May at first glance look like gnawing and sizers used by rodents but they're actually simple tusks used for display and for grooming so they have to turn their heads sideways to bite with their molers teeth that scientists at one point thought more closely resembled those of rhinos and horses and then chew normally from there things go right back to strange again when the food makes its way to their unique multi-chambered digestive system that ferments with the help of microbes a lot lik in cows and other ruminants but unlike true ruminants hxis don't regurgitate a cud to continue chewing their digestive system is one way and because they live in such dry habitats hyraxes also have pretty efficient kidneys that help them conserve water this means that their urine is extra concentrated when Nature finally calls and it quickly dries into something resembling molasses social high Rax species often use mittens effectively common bathroom Mounds to do their business creating mountains of pea crystals that fossilize over time and fossilized hyrax waste is so abundant and unique that it even gets its own special mineral name hirum fossilization of this thick quick drying urine can also capture environmental data like atmospheric radioisotopes and Airborne pollen you can think of it as a less glamorous version of the insect and Amber effect so while colder regions can use ice cores as time capsules for studying climate change South Africa gets to use huge piles of fossilized hyrax pea all of this is weird and wild enough but let's get back to the common ancestor of the elephant in the room what is the deal with hyrax taxonomy they look like rodents they digest sort of like ruminants they chew with teeth like horses they have incizors that are kind of like tusks so where in the mammal family tree do they fit in by looking at bones and later at proteins scientists have concluded that the hierra belong in a CA called pangula literally almost ulet this group is comprised of the orders probia elephants sirenia manatees and dugongs and Hier oidia our friends the hyraxes the pungulate likely arose roughly 65 million years ago when mammals really started to go nuts after the dinosaurs were gone and although grouping these three orders together has been pretty agreed upon since the mid 20th century figuring out how exactly each order is related to the other two has been messy comparisons using Anatomy amino acids and different Gene sets have each given contradictory answers even with the help of increasingly sophisticated DNA tools we still don't have a totally clear answer as to which of the three orders branched off when in other words between hyraxes elephants and sea cows we still can't really tell who's more closely related to whom right now there is basically equal molecular evidence supporting any of the three possible Arrangements Hierro coida could have split off first from probia and sirenia sirenia could be an outgroup to probia and hocoa or hocoa and sirenia could be more closely related to each other than to probia and the Persistence of this uncertainty makes it very possible that this specific case is an example of a poemy a poemy is when speciation occurs not as a two-way branching event on a philogenetic tree but as a simultaneous branching of three or more species from the same common ancestor usually this is simply a placeholder in an evolutionary tree until we can figure out which species branched off first which is a scenario called a soft poemy but it is possible for a three-way species radiation to be for all intents and purposes truly simultaneous or a hard pitam and chromosomal evidence suggests that radiation among the pugula orders took 4 to 7 million years and the latest genetic analyses suggests that this radiation began from an honest to goodness hard polinom so hyraxes don't just have surprising relatives their speciation represents a rare evolutionary occurrence as well and to cap it off According to some researchers these screaming teddy bears may also have an aquatic background red blood cells contain the protein hemoglobin which transports oxygen and iron throughout the body muscles contain a similar molecule called myoglobin and animals that dive deep underwater and hold their breath for a long time tend to have high concentrations of extra positively charged myoglobin molecules in their muscles the positive charge causes the molecules to repel each other allowing myoglobins to be highly concentrated in the muscles without sticking together and becoming useless and this extra myoglobin helps diving animals maximize their oxygen usage until they can get another breath hyraxes and elephants have the same Telltale pattern of more myoglobin than most terrestrial animals and and extra charged myoglobin in their muscles it's not as Extreme as it is in say modern whales but it is significantly higher than in species with strictly terrestrial mammal ancestors because scientists have yet to pinpoint the exact nature of the evolutionary branching of the pungulate we can't say for sure who this past aquatic common ancestor was but all signs point to probic cidian sirenians and hydran descending from one of the earliest known placental mammals to become underwater Specialists you might see a weird rock hopping guinea pig looking Critter today but appearances alone don't tell a fraction of the long and storied history in play here so the evidence is in hyraxes definitely are not rodents and definitely are the way cool descendants of a common possibly aquatic ancestor of elephants and sea cows and their superficial similarities to rodents can be chocked up to convergent evolution occupy the same ecological niche long in enough and you'll eventually end up with unrelated species who share similar adaptations the confusion about the hier's lineage is a reminder that taxonomy for all of its structure and rules is at the end of the day a human construct we love to understand the world around us what things are and where they come from but our tools for answering these questions always have limits and as those tools become increasingly sophisticated we can potentially solve more of these evolutionary Mysteries making beasts like the HX seem less bizarre to us don't forget to sign up for the pin Club at bizar bow.com by June 20th if you want to get one of these little potato guy pins and now for some bonus [Music] facts okay hxis are just so weird that we couldn't fit all of their weirdness into the main part of the video so here are a couple of bonus facts we mentioned that hyraxes aren't great at regulating their own body temperatures so along with basking in the sun Rock hxis will also do a behavior called heaping to keep warm and that's pretty much exactly what it sounds like the hyraxes will pile themselves together in a furry little stack in the den to conserve body heat which sounds adorable to be honest hxis also have relatively long gestation periods for mammals of their size something like 6 to 8 months and it's been suggested that this is just an evolutionary leftover from their ancestors many of whom were much bigger up to rhinos ized [Music]

Channel: Bizarre Beasts

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Keywords: hank green, vlogbrothers, bizarre beasts, animals, dftba, weird, enamel pins, pin club, bizzare beasts, beasts, bizarre, bizzare, hyrax, polytomy, evolution, mammals, elephant, manatee, paenungulata, africa, convergent evolution, hyrax animal, dassies, Mammalia, Hyracoidea, herbivorous mammal, weird animal facts, learning about animals, weird animals in the world, hyrax sound

Id: ASOyzh27VbY

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2024