@markscherz / markscherz.tumblr.com
Silly thing that bugs me: when a specific class of animal is separated from animals as a whole when talking about them. Ie. "animals and birds", or "animals and insects".
I keep seeing it with birds especially and I hate it.
Fun fact: my art teacher in highschool tried to tell me that reptiles were not animals, and then gave me detention when I corrected her.
HEY TUMBLR BIOLOGISTS (ZOOLOGISTS?)!!!!
I have a question 👀✨
Why is it that (presumably) no predator mammals have hooves?
Like most of the ungulates/hooves mammals I have seen are primarily herbivores (heard that sometimes cows n deer eat other animals for calcium n shit but it's very rare. Anyway). Why is that??
Were there any hooved mammalian predators in the past?? Are there, perhaps, any hooved, mammalian omnivores I'm forgetting about??
Would love to know more. :]
Yes there were! Entelodonts, for example!
This beautiful illustration by the incredibly talented Gabriel Ugueto is a particularly placid one; most illustrations do the predator trope of mouth-agape anger-pig. Also Gabriel neatly avoided having to put too much detail into the hooves by putting grass over them.
But also basically all whales are überpredators, and they evolved from hoofed ancestors (and are within Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates, in a group sometimes called Whippomorpha, because taxonomists are fun)
Also plenty of hoofed animals today will gladly eat meat, and sometimes even live animals. Including deers and cows. Because nature is metal and also does *not* like fitting into the nice little conceptual boxes we like to try to put it in. These are opportunistic omnivores I suppose.
Who was gonna tell me that orcas and giraffes are in the same Order
I mean, all you had to do was look at the hoofs
Teaching 5-year-olds about animal classification, fingernails dug into my palms, jaw clenched, just barely holding back telling them about how fish are fake fish are fake fish are fake
Fish are just as real as you and me. Because they are you and me. We are them. They is we are am them. Blorp.
A new friend!
Since people like frogs here
Hmm, I’m not convinced, I need to see more to figure out if I really do like frogs here.
We, humans, like to put things in boxes.
Giving species, families, groups and tribes.
But this creates endless paradoxes !
Life does not bend to the scribbles of scribes.
@markscherz help us
Qwopflop500 is based in the northeastern USA, based on their Reddit activity. Assuming this was taken near home, it can only be Anaxyrus americanus, A. fowleri, or one of the very few A. terrestris that ranges into the northeast. Based on iNaturalist observation frequencies, A. americanus is by far the most likely.
How do I intend to secure funding you ask?
By liberal application of this dude.
A scientific parody of Do you wanna build a snowman? from Disney’s Frozen. Lyrics by hyacynthus and myself. Vocals by me. A music video may be forthcoming.
GO AWAY DARWIN I AM SO DONE
THIS IS PERFECT.
If you don't want to call birds reptiles, you also have to stop calling all other dinosaurs reptiles, despite many of them being scaly and sharing many other traits with the rest of reptilia. Much much easier, more interesting, and more convenient, to just accept that birds are reptiles, and move on.
Sometimes I think about when media, stories, and cartoons often portray amphibians with long tongues that they can shoot at prey, which isn’t true except for chameleons… right? Well not all apparently!
I found out about the Supramonte cave salamander, endemic to the island of Sardinia. I mean… what?!
Yeah, I’m surprised too. Apparently it’s a thing. Once again amphibians do not cease to amaze me. You do you, little cave salamander.
photos and resources
Actually quite a number of related salamanders have ballistic tongues. It is totally crazy.
i´m doing a final run of preorders for these before retiring the printed designs and my old slug pattern alltogether.
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only a limited amount of preorder slots are available per color and they will close all together before friday the 27th!
adopt them in my shop - barksbog.squarespace.com
I'm a zoology student and I cannot for the life of me remember general or latin names, taxonomy or other specifics for animals we study. How do you do this. How do you remember stuff 😭 help
What sacrifices fo I have to make to unlock the Science Memory
I had to pay dearly for my ability to remember some (and only some) scientific names. The price? The ability to remember human names. If you told me your name more than four seconds ago, the chances are approximately zero that I can remember your name. This also applies to usernames on social media, so when it comes to recommending people to follow specific accounts, I invariably draw a blank.
But in all seriousness, the only thing you can do is repeat repeat repeat. The only reason we can remember any names is through repetition and context. The more you do it, the better and easier it gets.
Echinoderms (starfish, urchins, sea cucumbers) are more closely related to vertebrates than mollusks (octopi, snails, clams).
Mollusks are more closely related to arthropods (bugs, crustaceans) than vertebrates.
I've literally never given this any thought in the past, but I'm still surprised.
2022 was a completely crazy year for me. A year of contrasts. Highlights include: 11 new papers, 13 new book chapters, 38 new taxa, 5 new students, and 1 new baby.
The latest post on my website looks back on the year, with a healthy sprinkling of foreshadowing of exciting things to come in 2023! You can read it here:
it’s Weevil Wednesday
