Rough translation:

Scientist: Elephant descends from rat. The elephant, the largest land animal of the world. Did you know it descends from a rat?
The sensation from the barren desert of Usbekistan. Fossil researchers have found extremely old teeth and jaw fragments. They are more than 85 million years old and exhibit features common to our modern hoofed animals.

The conclusion of the scientists: Elephants, cattle and dears have lived already at a time when dinosaurs still ruled the world.

And more: The hoofed animals did not conquer the world starting from North America (as thought to date), but from Asia.

Judging from the fossil finds, David Archibald from San-Diego-State-University believes: 'Their ancestors were herbivorous mammals from the size of a rat.'

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Was ist wirklich an der Sache dran?	What's actually true in this sheer nonsense?
Tatsächlich wurden direkte Vorfahren der Huftiere in Ablagerungen der jüngeren Kreidezeit gefunden. Diese hatten auch nur die Größe einer Ratte. Soweit stimmt die Meldung. Natürlich stammen die Huftierte damit aber keinesfalls von den Ratten ab. Ratten gehören zu den Nagetieren. Elefanten, Pferde, Rinder und Rehe sind zwar Huftiere, lebten aber zu dieser Zeit noch nicht, sondern eben nur dieser rattengroße Huftiervorläufer. Diese waren jedoch mit den Dinosauriern nicht verwandt.	As a matter of fact, direct ancestors of the ungulates (hoofed animals) have been found in deposits of Late Cretaceous age. Another matter of fact is that these only had the size of a rat. This is the true part of the story. Naturally, this is no proof whatsoever that ungulates descended from rats. Rats belong to the rodents. Elephants, horses, cattle and dear are hoofed animals (ungulates) but did not yet live during that time episode. The only ungulate-like critters living together with the dinosaurs were these rat-sized ungulate ancestors. However, they were no relatives of the dinosaurs.
Was man alles aus wissenschaftlichen Meldungen machen kann .......!	Amazing what one can do with scientific news....!
Liebe BILD-Zeitung, wir hätten gerne mehr von diesen Meldungen für unsere Specials!	Dear BILD-newspaper, let us have more of these top stories for our Specials!

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The quality of the dinosaur GIF-animation depends on your platform, browser version and screen resolution. It should run smoothly on Netscape 2.x for Win95 or Netscape 2.x for Mac with thousands of colours. Strangely, Netscape 3.0 for Mac slows down the animation. Screen resolution of 256 colours results in some strange yellow or black background under Netscape 2.x for Mac, etc. etc.. Sorry, but I have no explanation. Any suggestion welcome.

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