Please provide a cite. In what language? Whose classification? What organisms did the word “animal” encompass? What organisms did the term “fish” include?
Aristotle’s History of Animals, written around 350 BC, includes fish along with all the other animals. I have never heard of any such distinction being made.
?
I think you’d have to agree that he breaths like a cadaver, and nothing like a bird
On the contrary, I believe that you’ll find that the vast majority of birds throughout history breathe in exactly the same way as Hitler.
There’s a rather large fraction (perhaps even a majority) of the population that thinks that salamanders and newts are lizards.
As far as the fish/animal thing, perhaps it’s a reference to the fact that when the Church forbade eating of animal flesh on Fridays and certain other days, they didn’t include fish in this prohibition.
Dinosaur descendant
I suspect that the majority of the population doesn’t think of salamanders and newts at all. But salamanders obviously aren’t a type of lizard, anyway: They’re a type of elemental.
That’s only to D&D players.
The division wasn’t between “animals” and fish, it was between warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals. You couldn’t eat mammals or birds, but you could eat fish, reptiles, and frogs, plus crustaceans, insects, and mollusks. Even then, the boundaries were flexible: at times it was allowed to eat water-dwelling beaver and capybara on Fridays.
Oh, and they’re not?
…and St. Augustine…
And when they do, it is mostly at night. Mostly.
I appear to have found an answer to my question from two years ago, and Folacin is vindicated: birds don’t have teeth because the ancestors of birds at the time of the asteroid strike eat seeds and nuts. That meant that they were still able to eat in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid strike, because there were enough seeds and nuts for them to survive.
Similar bird-like critters that still had teeth depended on hunting little animals as their food source. The supply of little animals was greatly diminished in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid strike, so bird-like critters with teeth died out, from starvation.
Why birds don’t have teeth: asteroid strike left seed-eating dinosaurs at top of pecking order
Soon, soon, I will have proof of my theory that Tyrannosaurus rex was covered in fuzzy yellow down like a baby duck. They laughed at me at the Academy. Fools! I’ll destroy them all.
I can’t access the original article, but it seems to be an extreme stretch to me. Four main lineages of birds seem to have survived the Cretaceous extinction event: the group including tinamous and large flightless birds; ducks/geese; chicken-like birds; and the ancestor of the Neoaves. The survivors in the first three groups could well have included seedeaters, but the surviving lineages in the latter group are believed to be have been shorebird-like and fed on aquatic life.
Plenty of insect-eating lineages of small animals survived the extinction event, including some mammals, lizards, and snakes. There’s no reason to believe that the lineages of birds surviving the extinction event had to be exclusively seedeaters.
Hm. I’ve been digging through the dope archives a bit recently (which is why DrDeth’s comment on fish was so fresh at hand) and remember this post about the birds that made it past the katey being shore birds (which didn’t all eat nuts and seeds.)
The Perfect Master speaks.
Looking at the diagram at the top of the page linked in the post that I linked in post #95 (going over sentence so far–yep, I think that works) reminds me of the strength and weakness of cladistics. The strength is that it can define (our best guesses about) real evolutionary relationships. The weakness is that it can be very, very complex.
For example, start with the bird article on Wikipedia and start clicking on the upwards clade links in the right hand boxes. Saying that “birds are dinosaurs” is making it very, very simple. What we call “birds” are the clade Neornithes, which is in the clade Ornithurae, which is in the clade Ornithuromorpha, which is in the clade Euornithes, which is in the clade Ornithothoraces, which is in the clade Pygostylia, which is in the clade Avebrevicauda, which is in the clade Euavialae, which is in the clade Avialae, which is in the clade Paraves (which is finally the level that includes what are traditionally called dinosaurs.) You can potentially take any novel trait and define a clade for the originator of that trait and all its descendants.
It isn’t simpler if you try to modify the Linnean system to be more precise on evolutionary relationships–then you have to add new sub- and super- divisions of taxonomic levels, such as superclass, subclass, infraclass, and parvclass (and similar at other taxonomic levels.)
The only choices with cladistics, Lennean taxonomy, or any other naming system is to make it either very complex and fine-detailed or simple and and poorly detailed.
This is true, but trivial: Trees are inherently built out of sub-trees, and sub-trees, being trees, are built out of sub-trees, recursively, only bottoming out when you get down to individual leaves, which, in this case, are species, extinct and extant. Naming every tiny little tree the big tree is made out of is up to you; my point is, that’s tedious, not complex. There’s a difference.
No, it’s complex. The tree in this case is not fractal; the branches can be of very different lengths and branching patterns. Of course, giving every single branching point a name would be simple and tedious. But even cladistics doesn’t seek to label every single branching point. Deciding which branches to label, and which to just include in the same named clade, is a complex matter.
And my personal follow-up: Why Pterosaurs aren't Dinosaurs - Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports - Straight Dope Message Board