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Tumblr Thread: Drama In The Reptile Community Is Unexpectedly Funny

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    Vertebrate - harmalite Follow Dinosaurs are Reptiles Birds are living dinosaurs All Dinosaurs are Birds Birds are Reptiles CLADISTICS ruined my life

    The logic in this very intellectual meme is difficult to argue with, we will say that. No wonder people who are passionate about the subject got offended. We can understand. Well, no, we can't, but seeing people argue about silly things is entertainment, and we can understand that.

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    Font - aquaticpaleo Follow yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification a-dinosaur-a-day Follow The choice is this: Birds are reptiles Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT That's it, that's the choice

    We can definitely imagine an argument over this breaking out in some classroom. A room full of students getting fired up about whether turtles are reptiles is something that we would pay to see honestly, especially if it truly does end in a fistfight. The next viral meme is a-waiting, bring it on. 

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    Font - shadybacon Follow What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing a-dinosaur-a-day Follow 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 t
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    Organism - shadybacon Follow 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, l'm trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.
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    Font - a-dinosaur-a-day Follow 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.
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    Rectangle - Caecillians Amphibia - Salamanders Frogs & Toads Tetrapoda Monotremes (A) Mammalia Marsupials Eutheria (B) Tuatara Amniota Lepidosauria Lizards (C) - Snakes Reptiles - Turtles Crocodilians Birds 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.
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    Font - anais-ninja-bitch Follow don't throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them. virovac Follow 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. haltraveler Follow IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all
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    Reptile - aethersea Follow hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed haltraveler Follow 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
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    Font - 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 cla
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    Font - alexaloraetheris Follow 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. knitordeath Follow 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.
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    Font - theclockworkjules Follow .which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles .which evolved from amphibians .which evolved from fish. invisible-goats Follow *runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD
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    Azure - saxifraga-x-urbium Follow you could have left the feathers on this time tbh gigglepuffpixie Follow *glues the chicken feathers to a crocodile* BEHOLD A FISH 85,141 notes

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