my teacher just called thomas edison a genius of using “shared knowledge” and “putting together other people’s ideas” and my inner STEM student is fucking FUMING
“oohh well he was innovativee-” stealing all your ideas from nikola tesla and privatizing inventions he wanted to be publicly accessible doesnt make you a genius it makes you a dead cunt i wish was alive so i could kill you again
unfortunately, due to several experiences in my youth, i cannot just “walk up and join the circle of people talking”, but it does sound lovely thank you
“go ahead and mingle” are four of the scariest words in the english language thank you and goodnight
i saw a really cool butterfly expert man on PBS and was so in awe of him and his butterfly knowledge i tracked down the episode online to see how to spell his name and found his twitter and followed him, only for the next day to awaken to him having read not only my webcomic, but also my livetweets saying how i wanted to marry the butterfly man. he said he was flattered. anyway the moral of the story is please don’t underestimate how far down your twitter a bored entomologist will scroll, and also the internet was a mistake.
yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification
The choice is this:Â
Birds are reptilesÂ
Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENTÂ
That’s it, that’s the choiceÂ
What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing
NopeÂ
Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds)Â
So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptilesÂ
birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily.Â
But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles?
I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.
It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification.Â
And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals.Â
So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing.Â
don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.
Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it.Â
You are technically a fish.
IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all
hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed
Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like thisÂ
The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators.Â
This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.
I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.
Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.
