#cladistics

[prokopetz]

I want to see an RPG with Pokémon-style damage types based on real-world cladistics. All having to come up with type matchups for clades that would never interact in real life. Your character gets mauled by a bear and its damage type is just "Bear".

[opabinia--regalis]

the complete transition from basal whippomorphs to ambulocetids to basilosaurids to modern whales!

[typhlonectes]

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Below the poll is a series of animal images labeled A through J. A is the least close to the birds we have today; J is the closest. If you encountered these animals in the wild, which would you call birds? If you pick a higher up option, then that means you consider all the below ones birds as well - so if you pick A, then BCDEFGHIJ are all birds. If you pick J, only J is a bird.

So - at what point would you call these animals "birds"?

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

Voting ended onJun 21, 2023

A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO IT CAN LEAVE PALAEOBLR. I NEED PEOPLE WHO DON'T RECOGNIZE THESE ANIMALS ON SIGHT TO VOTE.

I apologize to all of y'all with vision impairments for whom this poll is inaccessible. Alas, this is an experiment, and I cannot name the taxa. Thank you.

All alt text includes artist attribution; I did not make these pictures myself.

[herpsandbirds]

Whole genome shotgun phylogenomics resolve the diving beetle tree of life

Johannes Bergsten, Johan A. A. Nylander, Oscar E. Ospina, Alan R. Lemmon, Kelly B. Miller

Abstract

Diving beetles (family Dytiscidae) are important generalist predators in freshwater ecosystems that have been around since the Jurassic. Previous phylogenetic studies have identified a largely stable set of monophyletic named groups (subfamilies, tribes and subtribes); however, backbone relationships among these have remained elusive. Here we use whole genome sequencing to reconstruct the phylogeny of Dytiscidae. We mine de novo assemblies and combine them with others available from transcriptome studies of Adephaga to compile a dataset of 149 taxa and 5364 orthologous genes. Species tree and concatenated maximum likelihood methods provide largely congruent results, resolving in agreement all but two inter-subfamily nodes. All 11 subfamilies are monophyletic, supporting previous results; possibly also all tribes, but Hydroporini is recovered as paraphyletic with weak support and monophyly of Dytiscini is method dependent... Resolution of tribes in Dytiscinae is affected by methodological inconsistencies. Platynectini, new tribe, is described and Hydrotrupini redefined within subfamily Agabinae. This study is a step forward towards completely resolving the backbone phylogeny of Dytiscidae, which we hope will stimulate further work on remaining challenges.

Read the paper here:

https://resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/syen.12685

[iamthekaijuking]

My current phylogenetic tree of flying wyverns, most bird wyverns, and a few extra.

Much like the Polypterygia tree, the explanation for it details ecology, anatomy, and evolution in a species profile for each monster, which is too long for a tumblr post, so I made a document you can read here!

If you were a Patreon member, you could view it months in advance while I worked on it. The doc is 106 pages long, has almost 61,000 words, and has 508 annotations clarifying what information is Fanon, Canon, and Fanon built off Canon info. There’s a chapter index so you can skip to whatever wyverns and families you want to read about!

The formatting was done by @dappercritter. Additional theories were from Unnatural History Channel, @theukon-dos, @mayfly0678, @glavenychus, @batwards-running, and @orphanbane.

Thank you all so much for being patient, I really didn’t think it would take this long to write this or that it would be this much. It blows the Polypterygia document out of the water, so now I’m going to have to hold it to the same standard in the future, but for now I’m at peace.

[maklodes]

I was imagining a guy who always tags some clade of the organisms (if any) central to his posts . Like, he'll tag a video of some geese "#anseriformes" or tag a picture of an orchid "#asparagales" etc. (Similar to captious-solarian but only one clade tag per post). I'm trying to imagine the funniest clade that could be used to cover all human-centered posts.

E.g. "Maggie Kang, Chris Appelhans, and Michelle Wong won the Oscar for best animated feature with KPop Demon Hunters! #haplorhines" I think some obscure intermediate clade would be funnier than something super broad and ancient like "#eukaryotes" or something fairly recent and narrow like "#hominidae."

[freegazafromhamas]

I just learned that, as even-toed ungulates, cetaceans have a 4 chambered stomach

Now, for the Jewish scholars amongst my 800 or so followers, I pose the following question:

Let us say some sort of whale evolved the ability to subsist on seaweed or algae and re-evolved the ability to regurgitate and chew cud to break down the plant matter for fermentation in the way that its land cousins like cows and sheep do...

Would that whale become Kosher, assuming it could somehow domestically raised and then properly slaughtered?

Yes, Kosher. it is a cladistically even toed ungulate that now chews its cud.

No, not Kosher. Even if it once had cleft hooves, those have now evolved away.

No, not Kosher. Judaism thinks cetaceans are fish and they don't have scales.

Goy button/Results

Voting ended onAug 27, 2024