We have a diamond back terrapin and a wood turtle which don’t fit the molds too well either.
True, but crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards. Saying birds aren’t reptiles is like saying that dolphins aren’t mammals because they don’t look like horses.
I’ve always liked the old joke from Victorian times in Britain, about the railway official explaining the rules / fares for passengers’ pets travelling with them: “Cats is dogs, and birds is dogs; but this here Tortoise is a Hinseck, and you don’t need to buy a ticket for him.”
The problem is that reptile has a common meaning, and it doesn’t include birds. If you want to describe a monophyletic clade that includes amniotes except synapsids, I’d suggest you call it something else, like sauropsid.
I understand that Linnaean classifications often clash with current understanding of evolutionary development, but I don’t think the answer is to arbitrarily change word meanings.
You should have tried to help it submerge!
Yup, it really blew s - n - a - p - p - e - r
All tortoises are turtles. Not all turtles are tortoises.
The water ones are terrapins.
What’s a tortoise? Do you come up with these questions?
That there’s an interesting definition of ‘arbitrary’ you got.
By the normal usage ‘using the word in a way that’s actually meaningful and logical’ is not arbitrary. What is arbitrary is ‘insisting on a meaningless definition, because, dammit, old ignorance is better than new knowledge’.
Defining ‘reptile’ as ‘all of these related animals except for birds’ makes it a meaningless term.
They don’t actually have anything in common aside from common descent. They have different bauplans, different metabolisms, different integument, different environments, different diets. Even ‘fish’, which is the most insanely paraphyletic group that currently exists, is more meaningful, since it includes a smaller selection of bauplans and environments.
Placing crocodiles (suchian Archosaurs) in the same group as lizards (squamate Lepidosaurs) but not birds (dinosaurian Archosaurs) renders that grouping useless.
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
They’re written down. It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response.
Shall we continue?
Good advice. Or as the late Steve Irwin said, “If you don’t know what it is, don’t muck with it.”
Let me tell you about my mother…BLAM!
A lakeside resident telephoned about the turtle he found wandering in his yard. I asked him what kind of turtle it was, and he answered that it was one of those he saw commonly around his lake. He had helpfully put it into the lake, but an hour later it was back in his yard. He put it again into the lake, and again it crawled onto his yard. He even carried it out “twenty feet from shore, past all the weeds” but it insisted on crawling back out. What gives?
I explained that our water turtles (several species of “pond siders”) will leave the water to lay eggs, or to travel to a new pond. This would be perfectly normal, and not a situation in need of intervention. Then he said that, in addition to leaving the water, the turtle just didn’t act right. It swam poorly, flailed a lot, and couldn’t submerge. Might it be sick? And therefore seeking out the land?
Well, there are some possibilities. Certain traumatic injuries, and some infections, may produce gas trapped in the pleural cavity, preventing a turtle from submerging. I agreed that we should evaluate the animal; would he please bring it to our hospital? An hour or so later the good gentleman arrived carrying a cardboard box that contained – you guessed it – a perfectly normal but water logged and probably pissed off gopher tortoise. Since then, I’ve elicited more definitive descriptions from callers regarding their turtles.
Useless for whom? Some biologists, I guess, but, remarkably, generations of nonspecialist English speakers have usefully used the word “reptile” to describe a pretty clear grouping of tetrapods.
Given that the large majority of English speakers would consistently distinguish between “birds” and “reptiles” in a way that isn’t consistent with the latest cladistic principles, I think it makes sense for specialists to use specialized vocabulary for specialized meanings.
Sure, you can say that it’s bad form to use jargon needlessly, but I’d say it’s also not polite to be the know-it-all who insists that people aren’t using their own vocabulary correctly.