GOOD GRACIOUS ASS IS BODACIOUS @humanfaxmachine - Tumblr Blog

terpsikeraunos

insults i learned from wuthering heights

he’s such a cobweb, a pinch would annihilate him

cockatrice

I’d rather be hugged by a snake

by chance, you’ve managed tolerably

pitiful changeling

it is not poisoned, though I prepared it

don’t degrade yourself into an abject reptile

thou saucy witch

mainmanblackdynamite-deactivate

Shout out to Eric Andre

welele

gripthumb

cool

19731753701-deactivated20191227

RAT TRAIL

roboticfennec

RatChain RatChain RatChain RatChain RatChain RatChain RatChain RatChain

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These are actually shrews!! They all hold onto the base of each other’s tails and travel in a line so they don’t get lost from their mother while out in the open! ((What makes it even better; these little groups are referred to as caravans!))

devilishcreature

Shrews are good!! Please do not kill them, they eat mice.

isis-

i really love how one shrew in the chain did a loop and so them all the ones after it also did a loop

amazing

aplpaca

That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.

aplpaca

These

are more genetically compatible than These

and that’s why morphology-based phylogeny has Issues

thellamamongler

@aviculor

aviculor

The problem is perspective. People always think dogs are the ‘standard’ animal, the metric to use for whether or not two organisms “look like” they’re related. When in fact they’re a massive outlier due to the fact that we fucked up this lineage of wolf beyond recognition with selective breeding. It’s why people always say “breed” when they mean “species”, especially when talking about groups like lizards which can’t even be defined cladistically since some of them are closer to snakes than each other. To say nothing of fish.

thetinybutimportantthings

I once read an article that emphasized there is no such thing as a fish. Sharks and rays, lamprey, lobe-finned fish like lungfish and coelacanth, bichir and sturgeon, and of course the multiple infraclasses of more “modern” fish groups are all only very distantly related to one another. They’ve maintained semi-similar body structures only because there are limited ways to efficiently move through water as a vertebrate.

This

And this

Are more distantly related from one another than you and I are from a lungfish

Which is absolutely fuckin wild.

bogleech

Not only that, but all of us air-breathing land vertebrates, all the lizards and chickens and people and frogs, are closer to one another than those three “fish” are to one another as well.

i-have-approximately-4-bones

these

are genetically closer than these

i-have-approximately-4-bones

and…

these

are genetically closer than these

i-have-approximately-4-bones

and my personal favorite, it really fucks with people…

these

are more genetically similar than these

augustdementhe

COOL.

varkarrus-deactivated20200511

just the other day, one of my friends mentioned this book, “Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History,” which apparently has a (tongue in cheek) chapter that argues that Cows are actually Fish.

perkwunos

If you were to make the word “fish” refer to a monphyletic group, it would include cows, as well as humans, since we all share the same common ancestor. It would be equivalent to calling an animal a vertebrate.

esoanem

To jump back to the point above about us fucking dogs up, part of the weirdness here is that dogs seem to be uniquely fuck-up-able

Most domesticated species of animal still bear substantial similarities to their wild counterparts (and not for lack of trying); they may be bigger, or stronger, or woolier, or produce more milk and so on but a cow and a buffalo still look pretty similar. Meanwhile, even working dog breeds like terriers have little immediately apparent similarity to a wolf, and a Tibetan Mastiff looks more like a bear than it does to either

Iirc, the reason dogs seem to be so plastic is an open question in biology