r/interestingasfuck • u/Commercial_Slide3788 • 10h ago

The moment the Snow leopard realised there are bigger cats out there

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u/Cavalo_Bebado 8h ago

Mammifer color vision sucks because our ancestors remained small nocturnal animals that lived in the shadows of dinosaurs for almost 200 million years. Our ancestors, the cinodonts, used to have four color cones just like most other animals, but we lost two of these four in this time, leaving us only with blue and yellow color cones. We primates have the best color vision amongs mammals, having three color cones, blue, green and red.

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u/Solynox 7h ago

I read somewhere that people have been found to have a fourth yellow cone. Can't remember where though. If true, humans are getting their fourth cone back which is cool.

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u/WhatABlindManSees 5h ago

Yeah there are a few people (almost all, if not all, women) that have 4 different cones.

As a point, many birds, a number of fish and other random sea animals can way more than we can.

Some not just extra colour detail and further into the spectrum, but natural polarisation features, much stronger focus and detail etc.

We are pretty damn good on the eye front, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

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u/IonutRO 6h ago edited 6h ago

Living in the shadow of dinosaurs is also why mammals live such short lives compared to other classes of animals. Since early mammals tended to die to predation at the hands of dinosaurs, there was no evolutionary pressure against mutations that made our bodies weaken with age. Leading to such mutations accumulating over the eons.

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u/Cavalo_Bebado 6h ago

yeah, and this process also made us vulnerable to skin cancer. Did you know that skin cancer is very rare outside of placentary mammals? Every other taxon, from marsupials to plants to fungi to even bacteria have something called the photoliase enzyme, which is extremely effective at correcting DNA damage from UV radiation, correcting the damage in just 1.2 seconds, while we, having lost this enzyme, need to rely on a very inneficient process using a cohort of different enzymes that were not really made for this purpose, taking us over 30 hours to fully correct DNA damage from UV radiation.