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<blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 501670" data-attributes="member: 2205">Uhh, marsupials are mammals.&nbsp; Marsupials are much closer to tigers than, say the dinosaurs.&nbsp; And during the 120+ million years of dinosaur dominance of the earth, the megafauna looked completely different to the mammalian fauna that followed.Convergence is a useful scientific theory for your purposes here, but be careful about taking it too far.&nbsp; Niches are very broad categories, and a number of different adaptive strategies can be equally successful at meeting them.&nbsp; There are a few niches that really demand certain body types (so phytosaurs and crocodilians look almost exactly the same, for instance, as do sharks, ichthyosaurs and dolphins despite wildly divergent ancestry.)&nbsp; But do velociraptors and leopards look very much alike, even though they were about the same size, and hypothetically filled the same &quot;niche?&quot;&nbsp; Or why do brachiosaurs and giraffes look so different in terms of size?&nbsp; Why do indricotheres look so much like sauropod dinosaurs, although nothing else has before or since since the dinosaurs themselves?There should be more to it than simply swapping names and descriptions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Desdichado, post: 501670, member: 2205"] Uhh, marsupials are mammals. Marsupials are much closer to tigers than, say the dinosaurs. And during the 120+ million years of dinosaur dominance of the earth, the megafauna looked completely different to the mammalian fauna that followed. Convergence is a useful scientific theory for your purposes here, but be careful about taking it too far. Niches are very broad categories, and a number of different adaptive strategies can be equally successful at meeting them. There are a few niches that really demand certain body types (so phytosaurs and crocodilians look almost exactly the same, for instance, as do sharks, ichthyosaurs and dolphins despite wildly divergent ancestry.) But do velociraptors and leopards look very much alike, even though they were about the same size, and hypothetically filled the same "niche?" Or why do brachiosaurs and giraffes look so different in terms of size? Why do indricotheres look so much like sauropod dinosaurs, although nothing else has before or since since the dinosaurs themselves? There should be more to it than simply swapping names and descriptions. [/QUOTE]

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