"Stuff is eaten by dogs, broken by family and friends, sanded down by the wind, frozen by the mountains, lost by the prairie, burnt off by the sun, washed away by the rain. So you are left with dogs, family, friends, sun, rain, wind, prairie and mountains. What more do you want?"
Federico Calboli
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Cladistics
From the always reliable XKCD, via Jonathan who just emailed that he was in Nairobi impatiently waiting to go out in the bush. We should all be so lucky as to have THAT cause for impatience!
I used to take seat of my university's herpetology club. The easiest way to peeve off a herpetoculturist, fancy word for reptile hobbyists, is that they don't fall under the same clade.
A turtle falls under its own clade. Crocodiles are grouped together with birds. Monitor lizards and snakes are their own lineage from mosasaurs. None of them are actually closely related to each others.
Saying all those gets the average laysperson hot-blooded and angry that their view of the natural world has been debunked.
2 comments:
Thanks for the laughs.
I used to take seat of my university's herpetology club. The easiest way to peeve off a herpetoculturist, fancy word for reptile hobbyists, is that they don't fall under the same clade.
A turtle falls under its own clade. Crocodiles are grouped together with birds. Monitor lizards and snakes are their own lineage from mosasaurs. None of them are actually closely related to each others.
Saying all those gets the average laysperson hot-blooded and angry that their view of the natural world has been debunked.
Still true though (;-)
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