Where do you turn to whenever you want to do a research?
99.9% place that comes to mind is GOOGLE, so about the koalas thing having the same fingerprint as humans, i looked it up on google guess what i found.
Humans, along with our closest relatives chimps and gorillas, are pretty much the only animals that have fingerprints. The only other is the koala, an adorable marsupial that is separated from us by 70 million years worth of evolution.
Since we share these distinctive marks with our primate cousins, it's quite likely that fingerprints first evolved with our common ancestor several million years ago. But that isn't the case with koalas, who are alone among all marsupials in having these prints.
And it's not just that our fingerprints are roughly similar to koalas - they really are identical. A trained expert would have trouble telling human and koala fingerprints apart, even using a microscope. You can see a comparison of koala and human fingerprints on the left. While the two look quite similar in the larger view, it's under the even higher resolution of an electron microscope that they really look pretty much indistinguishable.
So why have we undergone precisely the same evolutionary path as koalas? Indeed, why do we have fingerprints at all, considering so few other animals have them? The first question might help answer the second, as both our hominid ancestors and koalas may have evolved fingerprints because they climb trees in the same way. Researchers from the University of Adelaide explained:
"Koalas feed by climbing vertically onto the smaller branches of eucalyptus trees, reaching out, grasping handfuls of leaves and bringing them to the mouth. Therefore the origin of dermatoglyphes [fingerprints] is best explained as the biomechanical adaptation to grasping, which produces multidirectional mechanical influences on the skin. These forces must be precisely felt for fine control of movement and static pressures and hence require orderly organization of the skin surface."
As always, I think the real takeaway from all this is quite straightforward: the next time fingerprints are found at a crime scene, investigators need to consider the possibility of super-intelligent koalas. And if they don't find any fingerprints at all? That just means the koalas are even smarter than we thought.
Via LiveScience. Image via.
https://io9.com/5798400/koalas-have-exactly-the-same-fingerprints-as-humans
I'm glad you elaborated on the original post's mention of fingerprints because that caught my attention too! It is cool to learn to the evolutionary advantage (grasping leaves easier).
In one of my anatomy classes, my teacher told us that fingerprints are formed when a developing fetus rubs the developing fingers against the wall of the uterus. The random rubbing patterns create grooves in the skin, as the skin grows. I can't site a source here because my teacher told us that in class. I haven't looked it up to fact-check since, but I'm sure it holds some weight!
I love this Linda - I love that our individuality is a by product of such co.intimacy - the stroking between self and self maker. we often got so judgmental for being needy for not being wholey independent and so I just love this!! thankyou
so even though there is no sited source - this gets my vote!:))
I love this fact, too!
So in theory, when I press my face against my pregnant girlfriends belly and squish her belly (mommy), and I can feel her pushing against (the baby) me through mommy's belly, I could actually be helping shape those fingerprints by changing the shape of the uterus when I press against it and she reaches out to touch me? Because the baby definitely responds to me even though she is still inside mommy's belly. That's an awesome fact, and touches me just a little, as I am sooo excited about my first baby on the way!!! Thanks for sharing!!!
Wow, what an AWESOME answer @deeclown. FAR more information on that subject than my girlfriend stumbled upon the other night. Thanks for elaborating on that little tidbit. I just saw they were "similar". Didn't know they were that similar!
Now this is a proper answer!
Keep it up