First cat video ever? 1899, colorized & speed corrected.

I am always blown away by this. Like. This little girl was alive and laughing and wearing her little hat and in the sunshine over 100 years ago. And her cat was eating little treats from her hands and having a fun little time over 100 years ago. Like. Their existence in history is recorded as so much more than the moody and serious black and white Victorian family portraits. AND WE GET TO SEE IT AND FEEL AS HAPPY AS THEY WERE! I have so many feelings!

If anybody wants to look it up, it’s called “La Petite Fille et son Chat”.

CLADISTICS ruined my life

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily. 

But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles? I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.

It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification. 

And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals. 

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing. 

don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.

Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it. 

You are technically a fish.

IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all

hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed

Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this 

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators. 

This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.

I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.

Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD

you could have left the feathers on this time tbh

It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.

Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.

May I recommend the book “why fish don’t exist” by Lulu Miller

May I recommend

the book “why fish don’t exist”

by Lulu Miller

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Whenever this argument comes up the English major side of me flares up. Like, this wouldn’t be a problem if people would be willing to acknowledge that words can have different meanings in different contexts. What “reptile” means in cladistics is different than what “reptile” means in the common vernacular and that’s ok. It’s good even. Sometimes you say reptile to refer to scaly-skinned vertebrates that lay leathery-shelled eggs and have exothermic metabolisms, and sometimes you say reptile to refer to a specific clade within taxonomy, and that’s fine. That’s ok. It’s good even.

Hey future me! You’re a weiner! And guess what? No matter what comeback or scathing insult you can come up with to give me in retaliation, that shit’s gonna fall on deaf ears cuz Past Me’s never gonna know what you’re sayin. Get rekt idiot

>:(

ROUND 4: JERMA (internet) VS SPHAGNUM MOSS (real)

Here at the EPA we value native earth species over invasive ones. Vote for Sphagnum Moss to help us control invasive species such as the Jerma, which pose a threat to earth ecosystems.

funny enough, the reason they ask you to donate is because they've already committed to a huge donation and are trying to get you to "pay it off" essentially. So, when you agree to donate 50 cents via the card reader, you're not contributing to the campaign...you're helping that company break even on the big donation they made. If you don't donate, they end up having to actually pay that money and come out the other side short.

So, in essence: donate directly to a campaign with your own money--dont let these corporations use you to "get back" the money they lost by making a donation.

“only karens ask for refunds” is pro-corporation propaganda. if they don’t give me what i want they’re giving me my money back and that doesn’t make me an angry middle-aged karen harpy, you’re just cucked by stupid reddit memes

Really though, remember the woman who sued McDonald’s because their coffee was hot and everyone took the piss out of her and a bunch of other people who sued corporations for a “silly” reason and then it turned out most of them were right and entirely harmed by the company and they were just turned into a joke by the company propaganda machine?

Imo the current obsession with mocking anyone who asks for a refund, returns something or god forbid wants to talk to a manager is just the second version of this. Companies will cut corners wherever they can and mock you when you complain.

Yesterday my pizza order got to me cold and missing my soda. When I asked about both from the driver he said he couldn’t go back for the 2L because he was technically a door dash driver. I called the store and it turns out when they’re slammed (which they had been), they get door dash drivers to help with delivery to help them catch up.

So I spoke to the manager, assured her that I wasn’t angry, just kind of frustrated - part of why the pizza was cold was that door dash drivers don’t have the heat retaining delivery bags the actual delivery employees of the pizza place get, and because he wasn’t an employee of the pizza place the driver wouldn’t be going back to the pizza place and couldn’t get my soda.

And the manager said she’d get her first driver going in my direction to bring by the soda, and offered to give me a credit for the pizza being cold, and we pleasantly ended the conversation.

Because it’s okay to say “hey, this isn’t what I was told I’d be getting”, you just have to be polite and reasonable about it.

This. Vast difference between “having a problem and politely but firmly expecting that they provide what’s been paid for” and “abusing some underpaid customer-facing employee who is neither at fault for the situation or able to fix it.”

???

????????

paying $6 to open my commissions brb

You could pay 6 dollars to open someone else's commissions.

“Our own culture has so much stuff that pottery has lost much of its former importance, but it is still one of the few universal possessions. Perhaps many thousands of years from now, when our culture has been buried by some apocalypse or other, archaeologists will start to dig up our remains and name us the Mug community, MC for short: we were a people who liked  our ceramics to be brightly colored, large enough to accommodate high volumes of comforting caffeinated drinks and above all dishwasher-proof.” – Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork (Basic Books 2013): 10.

“Characterized by thick-walled, generally (though not always) cylindrical, single-handled vessels, often brightly colored and elaborately decorated. Some researchers theorize (controversially) that some of the decorations on these vessels are in fact inscriptions, though attempts to “translate” these have been dubious. The frequent appearance of particular identical decorative motifs has led some researchers to suggest these vessels held some sort of social importance, perhaps indicating tribal or religious affiliation. It is popularly supposed that these vessels were used for the ceremonial consumption of some sort of psychoactive substance, but this is based more on the popularity of a few lurid “historical” novels and not on any actual archaeological evidence.”

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”

This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.

[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:

Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.

We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]

But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?

End image description]

because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing

I was so inspired by this I made it into a piece of art for a final in one of my courses for storytelling in conservation

please look at the name of this drink i saw at a boba place the other day

Russian desmans (Desmana moschata), photographed by Nikolay Shpilenok

u can be cringe and weird around me I still want u

I love the human immune system and am so grateful for all she does for me but she's a little bit of a bloodthirsty jingoist warhound sometimes. like please baby i know you came out triumphant in the battle of the Day Old Italian Takeout, I was there in the trenches, but its time to stop chasing the illusory unicorn of wartime economy and refocus on the domestic sector please baby we need to fucking digest things

reading about the coronation ceremony, it's impossible to parody this thing because the actual details are so ridiculous. instead of just having Christian leaders present, charles will make things more inclusive by also having Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh leaders bowing down to him! the chair he will sit on whilst wearing a crown made from plundered gold and jewels is recycled! the sovereign's sceptre will be carried by a black woman! instead of just asking lords to swear their allegiance, the king will demand the allegiance of everyone in the country!

i mean you wouldn't want to feel excluded from a ceremony glorifying britain's long history of colonial domination, murder and plunder, as well as our ongoing inclination towards boot licking during an event to honour one of the UK's biggest landlords at a time of widespread deprivation, would you?

cosmic horror (god loves you too much and keeps resurrecting you)