6d ago

egg time

26 comments

Let's compromise and call them both fish.
- Everything is a fish. Why not?
  
  Counterpoint: there's no such thing as a ghoti
- The pope approves
Do you secrete milk from mammary glands?
Bc that's like legit the only requirement. We set the bar low. Not like those elitist avians.
- Well, you have to be descended from a particular branch of the evolutionary tree that has the ability to secrete milk from mammary glands. If, say, a mollusc independently evolved milk production that wouldn't make it a mammal.
  
  They wouldn't independently evolve mammary glands, because only mammals have mammary glands, and they are not mammals, but mollusca.
  I'd say that's a bit of a chicken/egg situation, but I don't think we need to bring in more classes.
- I was always taught live birth was also one of the requirements. Are there any other exceptions besides platypus?
  
  Echidna also lay eggs.
Is there anyone arguing against dinosaurs being birds anymore? This was still a relatively new thought to the general public when Jurassic Park came out, but IIRC, it was pretty well accepted among paleontologists even back then. More people try to badly argue that Pluto is a planet than try to say dinosaurs aren't birds.
- This is the other way around. There are some who want to push back the definition of "bird" to include more dinosaurs via earlier divergence. There are even a few that argue that certain conventially non-avian dinosaurs are actually from the agreed bird lineage but converged back on a bipedal dinosaur shape.
- Is it not the other way around? Birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds.
  
  I believe that, nowadays, it is generally accepted that dinosaurs, crocodilians and birds are all "archosaurs". In a similar way to how Australopithecus, Humans and Chimpanzees are all "hominids".
  
  All the remaining dinosaurs are birds though...
- You do see it sometimes, where people complain that dinosaurs are no longer fearsome giant lizards because we found out that they might have feathers and aren't SUV height, on social media and places.
  It generally becomes obvious that they have never met a goose, chicken, or been at risk of swooping before.
- .
Categorizing dinosaurs as birds is pointless, anyway. Categorizing birds as extant dinosaurs... now that is much cooler.
- I prefer my birds to be fish.
- As an Old, I appreciate this Wife Bad humor.
Aww, poor soyjak, are you upset nature doesn't adhere to your imaginary grouping made up before you had as much knowledge?
stings a bear to death

26 comments