What – texting pandas? Because, honestly, I just made that bit up. I mean, I’ll look into it if you like, but I’ll be surprised if that’s right.
Now look, if you cared about it that much, you’d stay on top of the latest developments in the cut-and-thrust world of phylogenetic nomenclature. Or, as TriPolar says, occasionally ask a schoolchild.
Hee, I was recently corrected by a schoolchild who informed me that the Bohr model of the atom is hopelessly out of date. Look kid, Neils Bohr won a Nobel Prize, I think I can still use his model of the atom to describe a necklace you made out of glo sticks.
They have ignored that rule when it suited their purpose.
Because that’s not how scientific naming works.
Apatosaurus ajax was discovered in 1877, two years before Brontosaurus excelsis. That gave Apatosaurus precedence when they were resorted into the same genus. (They’ve never been considered the same species.) This happened in 1903, so the idea that it’s new is rather more annoying than the insistence that it has to be Brontosaurus.
Not since since ~455BC, ask Aeschylus, maybe.
(And a tortoise and a turtle are the same thing according to Holden.)
You can still get dolphin in Barbados. But they usually call it dolphin fish and will quickly explain it is not the sea mammal.
Or Dorado in other locals.
Both Mahi-mahi and Dorado are better name anyway.
Some few call it Coryphaena hippurus
I calls it tasty.
It was dorado after dolphin, but now I only see mahi mahi on menus around here (it doesn’t come up often).
I couldn’t post it earlier on my phone, but re: my edit above, you could call it Coryphaena hippurus. You could also call it Scomber pelagicus or Coryphaena fasciolata or Coryphaena chrysurus or… apparently at least 14 other synonym names!
Brontosaurus…Pluto…how much more can we lose, I ask you?
Yeah, man–Big Paleontology, tryin’ to keep the brontosaurus down, man! 'Cause, like, it suits their purpose, man!
Wheels within wheels, man. Wheels within wheels.
And that’s the only stand-up act I’ve seen about dinosaurs.
I wonder what the writer/director formerly known as Judd Brontow thinks of this whole re-naming thing.
Here’s the key passage from the Wikipedia link Gyrate posted:
Briefly, there are two main divisions of sauropod dinosaurs (the really big long-necked ones): diplodocid and macronarian. Diplodocids typically have very long necks and tails, and long “horselike” skulls. Macronarians have more domed skulls with large nasal cavities (and may have had soft material that did not fossilize well like bulbous noses, sacs, or even trunks, for all we know).
The macronarians are further usually separated into basal macronarians, like Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus, and the titanosaurs (which typically have wider bodies than brachiousaurs, among other differences).
A famous confusion relevant to this discussion is that an early Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus skeleton was headless, and was erroneously paired with a Camarasaurus skull when put on display.
Paleontology is not only relatively new, it’s booming. Lots of new stuff is being learned. When I was a child, we were told that the sauropods had all perished in the Jurassic and none had made it into the Cretaceous. It turns out that was completely, delightfully wrong – many titanosaurs thrived around the world right up until the big rock hit.
Expect some parts of our understanding to shift again!
Indeed.
I agree that there’s no point in changing the popular name to suit the strict scientific naming. I think people ought to be allowed to call the creature famously painted by Charles Knight a brontosaurus whether it properly is or not.
After all, when they found out that the name “platypus” (“broad foot”) had already been used for a species of beetle ( Platypus (beetle) - Wikipedia ) that didn’t cause everyone to rename the Australian monotreme with the duck-like bill an “Ornithorhynchus” instead, even though that’s now its scientific name. It’s still a “duck-billed platypus”, beetle be damned.
As a nit-pick on the side bar conversation about mahi-mahi = dorado = dolphin (the mammal) - this is simply not true.
The dorado is, admittedly, occasionally called “dolphin” or “dolphin fish” but it is most certainly not a mammal.
Obligitary link to that font of all contemporary wisdom (no, not that one!): Mahi-mahi - Wikipedia
Yeah, well, I’d like to know if the Bullock’s Orioles hit 253 home runs this year, huh?
Heh, an interesting example is the use of “Turtle” and “Turtledove” in the Bible. Older translations tend to use them indiscriminately.
The Song of Solomon, King James Version:
Voice of the turtle?
The 21st Century updated KJV:
Okay, that makes more sense!
Right, I’m going to use brontosaurus. I prefer not to use the term dolphin when ordering seafood, but will if I can make myself clear that it is not the mammal. A panda is indeed a bear. A koala is not a bear, but people will invariably stick “bear” onto the name. An orca is actually a dolphin, not a whale.
Any other weird animal facts to add to the list?
Slightly misleading.
They didn’t just plunk a Camarasaurus skull on top of an Apatosaurus skeleton and think it was a new species - they knew the skull wasn’t right, but they had to give it something for the display, and they got the relations within the Sauropods wrong. And, while it contributed to a mis-portrayal of Brontosaurus, it didn’t really contribute to the debate about lumping/splitting, since both A. ajax and B. excelsis got it, until after A. louisae was discovered with an intact skull near enough to be definitely associated with it.
And, it really bears repeating that at no point were A. ajax and B. excelsis considered the same species. The discussion was whether they were the same genus. In 1879 (when* B. excelsis* was discovered), in 1903 (when it was decided that it didn’t warrant being in a different genus than A. ajax), in 2015 (when further study suggested that it, in fact, did)…always different species.
Leopards are members of the genus Panthera. There is a genus Leopardus, but that is an entirely different group of cats.
Cougars are sometimes referred to as “mountain lions” or “panthers”, but they are actually more closely related to housecats than to lions or to leopards.