TookTooks

The tooktooks around here are , as far as I can tell, exactly the same as the ones all over India and all through SouthEast Asia, and though its been a very long time since I was there, I think they are the same as the ones in East Africa. Tough little critters!

It appears that the tooktook has reached its peak, and more or less ceased to evolve!
This is much like the modern sharks of the world today...They are different species than the ones paleontologists dig up, but the overall design is very much the same. It seems that nature has little more to contribute to their design...They have been thoroughly tested by evolution, and they are as good as they can get.

And when did their design become stable and stop evolving?
Well, its certainly not clear but it was a long time ago. It came as no surprise to many that in amongst the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptian/Nubian empires, unambiguous images of tooktooks have been found. And further analysis of some of the damaged and only partially recoverable diagrams discovered at the same site show what appear to be gear ratios and clutch mechanism designs for them!

Clearly the tooktooks were fully evolved from this time. It is my personal opinion that the tooktooks were first domesticated by the "Atlantean" civilization that scholars are only now starting to acknowledge did truly exist and was quite advanced.
I suspect that the original wild tooktooks were native to the North Africa region and grazed over the vast plains of the Sahara (when the climate was less server than it is now). This is however just speculation because all traces of the original native tooktooks has been erased by the passing eons . The wild tooktooks were ultimately driven to extinction by human hunting (for use as spare parts for the domesticated tooktooks!) and the fact that the domesticated variety is very rapacious and packs of ferrel domestic tooktooks were able to outcompeted the native variety even on the savanahs.

The modern tooktook has, as I said, effectively stopped evolving. This is largely because, like the dandelion, they have stopped reproducing sexually. They now reproduce asexually (I believe it happens very quietly at night in garages and repair shops throughout there habitable range) and thus the opportunity for genetic diversity, and thus natural selection, is minimized.

But, the story does not stop there...
Man in our infinite wisdom feels that we can improve on nature and now with the advent of genetic engineering and gene splicing with the aid of viruses, there are some new genetically modified tooktooks!
They are a bit larger and the power source has been altered to be a single cylinder diesel engine rather than the standard gasoline engine. They are far noisier than the natural version but at this stage they do appear to have at least found their own niche in the tooktooks biotope.
It is also unlikely that we will get to see if they would eventually displace the natural version or be replaced them selves if nature were allowed to take its course...man has started interfering and we can be quite sure that man will continue to interfere as deemed fit (such is our Hubris!).

I dont know what will happen next in the future of the tooktooks, but I am pretty sure that when all is said and done, they will look more or less the same as they do now!