The Unbearable Lightness of Being Alien

I always bugs me how nearly all aliens in movies, litterature and TV obviously evolved on Earth, left  the planet ages ago, forgot all about it, turned purple, only to return and try to recapture it?
Of course I know that it's about emotions and understanding and seeing ourselves from the outside, but wouldn't it be great if just once in a while something alien - truely alien - turned up?

All aliens seems to have evolved from the exact same branch of vertebrae - mamals - with spine, skull, jaws, arms, legs fingers and toes. They're all very monkeylike. Even those with scales and wings. And this just doesn't add up or make sense.

Nom, nom, nom...

Features:
So lets just talk about the jaw for example:
All aliens have jaws. And they're full of humanlike teeth. 
The vertebrate jaw usually bears numerous teeth and probably originally evolved in the Silurian period. The jaw evolved from the most anterior two gill arches supporting the gills and appeared in the Placoderm fish. This further diversified in the Devonian. The two most anterior arches are thought to have become the jaw itself and the hyoid arch, respectively. So getting yourself a set of gills-turned-into-jaws, and then adding white teeth and fleshy lips on top of them, seems to be the hippest thing since... I don't know.. five fingers? If you want to know more about jaws, there is a neat Discovery documentary about it here.

Of all the animals here on earth it's only vertebrates, that's got this feature and a little googling has made it clear that even though species like fish (including lampreys), amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are vertebrates, more than 95 percent of known animal species on earth are in-vertebrates.
So how come that 95 percent of all alien lifeforms are vertebrates? 
And how about that spine, eh?

How come almost no designers or worldcreators thinks about where and what their beings are coming from? And how a different evolution on a very different planet would affect life. The only way mamals could be on top of things here on Earth is because the dinosaurs died out 65 mio years ago, and left the place to us! 

99.9 % of Star Trek aliens differ from humans so little that you start wonder why they bother putting on the make up at all. I'd love to see aliens being... well, alien for a change. Not even like THE Alien, but alien as in uncomfortably strange.

One of the few TV-programs I find interesting in this way - and inspired me quite a deal - was the Discovery Channels docufiction Alien Planet.  The show uses computer-generated imagery, which is interspersed with interviews from such notables as Stephen Hawking, George Lucas, Michio Kaku and many more. Wayne Douglas Barlowe (Illustrator and Head designer on Avatar and more) has done most (if not all) of the designs of the alien creatures together with the 3D animators, scientists and zoologist, that's contributed to the making of the show. Alien Planet was filmed in Iceland and Mono Lake in California and it's so worth watching. Just remember: It's a docu-fiction, so remember it's not science fact, just imagination. 

I sometimes wonder if aliens - if we ever meet any - have more in common with the oddness and unfamiliarity of the designs of HP Lovecraft than those of George Lucas. 

Why MEN?

Why do we have two sexes. Or more specific: Why do we have men? 

Why waste all that effort and energy in producing and caring for offspring that doesn't carry offspring themselves? Kinda pointless, right?

The maintenance of sexual reproduction in a highly competitive world has long been one of the major mysteries of biology given that asexual reproduction can reproduce much more quickly as 50% of offspring in sexual reproduction are males, unable to produce offspring themselves.

"Almost all multicellular species on earth reproduce using sex, but its existence isn't easy to explain because sex carries big burdens, the most obvious of which is that only half of your offspring—daughters—will actually produce offspring. Why should any species waste all that effort on sons?” lead researcher Professor Matt Gage, from University of East Anglia's School of Biological Sciences, said in a statement. 

Researchers from the University of East Anglia (UAE) believe they may have found an answer, suggesting that the evolutionary force known as ‘sexual selection’ plays a key role in improving population health and protecting us against extinction.

"To be good at out-competing rivals and attracting partners in the struggle to reproduce, an individual has to be good at most things, so sexual selection provides an important and effective filter to maintain and improve population genetic health,” said Gage. 

So - 2 sexes is a major asset, when it comes to a species survival in a competitive enviroment. But would it be so universal that we would expect to find it on other worlds as well? 

HALF A BILLION years old ancestors of arthropods found

I just love evolution - if that's possible at all to love a definition. 
But evolution is amazing! Think of all the endless possibilities of life there already has been, the ones that's here now and the ones that will come in the distant future. It really makes my head spin... 

Io9.com just featured this amazing article about these HALF A BILLION years old ancestors of spiders, shrimp and other arthropods. Or possible ancestors at least, since a lot of stuff happens during 500 mio. years. 

Anyone for squidditch? 

Anomalocarids - as they're called - are one of the oldest families of animals on Earth, and they truly looked like something thought up by the combined spawn of H.P.Lovecraft and H.R.Giger. 

From the io9 article:

The connection between anomalocarids and today's animals has long been a source of debate, and some paleontologists believed that there was no way to classify them properly. But thanks to Cong and his team, we have some strong evidence that arthropods — a group containing spiders, crabs, scorpions, and centipedes — are the distant descendants of these anomalocarids.A team of paleontologists led by Peiyun Cong found three gorgeously-preserved anomalocarid fossils in Yunnan Province, and described them today in Nature.

 The main overlap between the two groups, separated by 500 million years of evolution, is their brain structure. Arthropods have segmented, compartmentalized heads like anomalocarids. Plus, their brains connect to those "front appendages" which are called mouth flaps or antennae in today's arthropods. So both groups of creatures shared a very specific physical characteristic, which was a connection between those appendages and the brain.

-Illustration by Nicholas Strausfeld

And above, you can see a side-by-side comparison of one of the fossils (gray) witha a modern arthropod called an onychophoran or velvet worm (green). Long nerves from the frontal appendages extend to paired ganglia lying in front of the optic nerve and connect to the main brain mass in front of the mouth. Anomalocaridids had a pair of clawlike grasping appendages instead of feelers.
New fossil discovery of Anomalocarids actually contains traces of their brain structure — and amazingly, their half-billion-year-old brains look a lot like an arthropod's. Though some anomalocarids may have been as big as 7 feet long, these newly-discovered specimens are closer to the size of today's large insects.

Free Willyanomalocarid!!!!

If you found this interesting, you just might like my post on the origins of life on Earth too.

So just think about all the marvelous alien life there might be out there, beyond the deep, dark and dead vacuum of space, when you see what's been going on this tiny rock. 



Read the article at i09 here.
Read the full paper at Nature.