#Who knows what kinds of additional mindfucks await us | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

markscherz · 10 months

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Bird-reptiles is a butterfly-moth situation?

Precisely! These kinds of situations show us how wrong we have been for so long about the relationships among various animals. The pretty little boxes we like to make are often very, very wrong, phylogenetically, i.e., they are not compatible with the *actual* relationships among the organisms.

Here are a few other mind-fucks that have come to light as a result of modern methods being applied to traditional categories that turned out to be wrong:

• Snakes are lizards

• Termites are cockroaches

• Birds belong to lizard-hipped dinosaurs (Saurischia), not the bird-hipped ones (Ornithischia)

• All tetrapods are fish

• Insects are crustaceans

#the more you know #science #phylogeny #taxonomy #I find these kinds of situations hilarious #but also beautiful #they show us just how much we have learned over the last few centuries #many of these revelations simply could not have been interpreted correctly without the light of modern methods #and I think that's beautiful #Who knows what kinds of additional mindfucks await us #Answers by Mark

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