Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
You might spot it in wetland or forest habitats in parts of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. It likes to hang out beneath rocks or in burrows underground, usually not too far from a stream. A few of its favorite snacks include insects, worms, and plankton. How big does this salamander get? On average, it’s around 5-7 inches (12.7-17.8 centimeters) long.
katana nerds were/are? insufferable but the debunking / backlash is almost as bad
like why does it matter that a zweihander can smash a katana to smithereens. in the historical context both of these weapons were used in they never would have made contact. a katana was a great tool for what it was used for, which is why it was used for that
sword nerds in general are dumb for like fandomizing historical tools of war and removing them from their context. especially when you consider that a saltwater crocodile is the greatest living weapon and could best both a 16th century samurai and a 14th century german knight with its death roll. stop paying attention to pieces of metal and start paying attention to animals, nerds
bro what if you gave a zweihander and a katana to a saltwater crocodile though… holy shit. holy shit
Camilo’s holding a Crested Chameleon, which is endemic to Eastern coast Africa (not a Colombian species, but its coloration is pretty Camilo-esque!!) Antonio however has an Orinoco Crocodile, which IS native to Colombia and Venezuela (but is critically endangered currently).
The herp society is having a photo contest, and they didn’t say how many we could enter, so I entered these five. There’s no monetary prize but the winning photos do get to be featured in the CHS bulletin, and it’d be super fun seeing my work in print!
I won best in show! The chameleon is gonna be printed in the bulletin!
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.
*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken*
BEHOLD A LIZARD
you could have left the feathers on this time tbh
It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.
Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.
