Are there any animals that exist today that were around in the jurassic period?

Question

you

Your answer is:

1.Childish

2.Pathetic

3.Reported :)

Answer 1

The Shark i believe.

Answer 2

Crocodiles, Alligators and Komodo Dragons.

Answer 3

no some only exist today

Answer 4

YES! My Mother-in Law!!!!

Answer 5

The question is a bit difficult because you don't specify what you mean by an "animal".

I don't think there are any such *species*. There may be a couple of genera like _Lingula_, although I'm not convinced that just because something doesn't look very different from an ancient relative it should be in the same genus (Linnaean ranks are a burden on classification anyway). However, a great many animal *groups* have been around far longer than 150 or even 210 million years.

In fact, most animal *phyla* (including but not limited to sponges, cnidarians, molluscs, annelid worms, all sorts of arthropods; even chordates, the phylum to which we vertebrates belong) have existed since the Cambrian (543-490 mya) or even longer. Of course a phylum is a very inclusive group - you could say chordates are more than 500 million years old, but most of the lower-level and more familiar groups (such as sharks or lizards) are much younger than that.

Between phylum and genus level, some Jurassic or older animals that would look familiar today (which doesn't mean they are the same, just that their morphology can be similar to extant relatives) include horseshoe crabs, dragonflies, cockroaches, sturgeons, frogs, geckos, perhaps crocodiles (although I vaguely recall Jurassic crocodiles weren't that much like the modern species - certainly Early Jurassic ones weren't), sea urchins, starfish, brittle stars and crinoids, coelacanths... really, too many things to list.

In fact, if you took away dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles and ammonites, you'd probably find Jurassic animal life very similar to today's. One important thing that would be missing is the incredible insect diversity that is now associated with flowering plants. To my best knowledge, flowering plants didn't appear till the very latest Jurassic or Early Cretaceous; and when they did, that gave an enormous boost to things like bees and butterflies and other things that evolved to exploit flowers in some way.

And, of course, there would be little of today's mammalian diversity. Probably there would be no placental or marsupial mammals at all; and no birds other than very primitive ones, and those probably only from the Late Jurassic.

Answer 6

Jurassic Beetle: CSIRO Entomologist Discovers Living Fossil

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 1998) — CSIRO entomologist Dr John Lawrence admits it was a thrill: the delicate bronze-and-white spiny beetle glittering in the light of his microscope was a living fossil, whose ancestral roots go back almost 200 million years.

"The peculiar look of the animal caught my eye straight away. The unique combination of spines, scales and lack of wings. At first I was puzzled, then I realised it was an ommatid, a member of a family of beetles which dates back to the Jurassic," he recounts.

A fish, the coelacanth.

Alligators have existed since early in the Jurassic period (140-190 million years ago).

True crocodiles did not appear until the Jurassic They were different in lifestyle and appearance to today's crocodiles.

There were also cockroaches, but I couldn't find anything saying that the same species of roaches that existed in the Jurassic period were still here.

Answer 7

crocodiles, alligators, sharks..

Answer 8

Crocodilians (crocs, aligators, gharials), Chelonians (Turtles, Terrapins, Tortoises), Serpentes (Snakes), Squamata's (Lizards)

Answer 9

Birds maybe :/

Answer 10

The oldest living organisms on Earth right now

are things called Stromotolites. They look like rocks.

They are in essence bacterial rock formations.

They are at a place called Shark bay in Austrailia.

Apparently they are reckoned to be dated from 3.5 BILLION years ago.

This is the only thing I found on the net about them.

http://www.geocities.com/kateandross/Str...

Answer 11

All those dinosaurs in that documentary about that Jurrasic park on the island. It was a good one!

Also lots of small shrew and mouse like mammals. Wether they could be considered the same species as similar animals which exist today is debatable. It is  very difficult to make definite judgement with 65my old fossils. Croc fossils seem very similar to their cousins which exist today

Answer 12

I don't think there is a direct animal, as they have all evolved in order to adapt to the world today,

The Comodo Dragon is a very close relative.

Answer 13

crocodiles, sharks

Answer 14

Cockroaches, turtles, sharks, crocodiles, and some birds

Answer 15

There are quite a few.  The most famous example is the coelecanth, a fish living in the deep ocean off Madagascar and Indonesia.that has remained essentially unchanged from the Devonian period, some 400 million years ago.  Of course, even these 'living fossils' would be slightly different species from those found in the fossil record.

Another good example is the Tuatara, a lizard-like reptile of New Zealand, which has survived more or less unchanged for 200 million years.

Answer 16

Lots.  By numbers of species microbes in their 2 domains are the most common.  Arthropods in many forms are basically unchanged, this includes 1000's of insects and crustaceans.

Some sharks survive basically unchanged.

Turtles and crocodiles are still hanging around.

And fishes, lots of fishes survive as they were from much earlier then the Jurassic.

It is a misconception to think that each new form of life replaces its predecessors.  Even with the boost  "newcomers" get from the mass extinctions many of the old timers thrive.  But we tend to look in the wrong places, we notice the easily seen.  On the microscopic scale there are far more survivors, by both number of species and number of specimens of species then we wrongly assume.