Evolution
The oldest known fossils of singing voles date from the Ionian, around 300,000 years ago, and were found near Fairbanks. During the Ice Ages of the late Pleistocene, singing voles may have been much more widely distributed than today, and fossils have been reported from as far south as Iowa, which was then probably similar in climate to present-day Alaska. The closest living relative of the Singing Vole today is the Insular Vole, which is found only on two small islands off the west coast of Alaska, and probably diverged as those islands were cut off from the Beringia land bridge by rising sea levels.
Read more about this topic: Singing Vole
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)
“The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)