“nobody in miami knows how to drive” “nobody in austin knows how to drive” “nobody in chicago knows how to drive” maybe we shouldnt have cars

Maybe we should find people who are good at driving and give them really big cars, and then people can just pay a small fee to be driven around the city. Maybe in a regular loop so people always know where they'll be at certain times of the day.

But what if those really big cars were also really long and fast?

And what if they ran on electricity? But what to call them?

Fantabulous Looping Electromnibus!

I like the way you think

the first rule of hiking is to stay on the trail unless you spot a smaller cooler looking trail

A cougar wrote this

.......well....

CLADISTICS ruined my life

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 this 

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. 

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.

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

im sad that ppl of age don’t know we evolved from fish bc that means there’s a HUGE part of our origin- the part where we lived in the sea- that they’re entirely unaware of for some reason. Like all life on earth originated in water. All of it. There weren’t just suddenly squirrels???

Surprised we got this far without  mentioning that while cladistically, humans are fish, cladistically, fish are also not a monophylum :)

I.e. have the same problem reptiles have where the concept of a group called “fish” has so many problems that the simplest solution would be to just throw the term out entirely

(Also, shout-out to my old vertebrates class prof who wanted more sci-fi authors to keep in mind a marine evolutionary origin for their alien races)

That face when thinking about all the people who wanna be mermaids is just something deep in your bones wanting to go home -back into the unknown dark abyss of the ocean.

krabby keeps a tiny picture of ash in his bowl

Or does Ash force Krabby to look upon is dictator? When he wakes up, when he goes about his day in a tiny bowl he can't krabby-strut in, and then when he goes to sleep there again is his face....mocking.

Think about it 🤔

I'm sorry...

WHO WAS GONNA TELL ME CRASH BANDICOOT ISN'T A FUCKING FOX?

wHAT the FUCK IS THIS?

Whole world on its way out of 2020 waiting for some colossal bullshit to come straight outta right field in its final days now that everything seems calm

You gotta be fucking kidding me, 2020?

We were almost at the end of the year and now we've got fucking covid19.2

For real?

....why?

I’m having a stroke,,,

You're laughing. It's December 9th 2020, we have a new "Loss", @kaijuno is having a stroke, and you're fucking laughing.

hello girl I’m confessing my love to you

I ain't showing you bobbies or vagene