If you’re confused: Birds are dinosaurs, crocodiles aren’t; note the “closest living relatives

  • dogsoahC@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Though, isn’t being part of a group the closest you can get in terms of relatedness?

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    3 months ago

    Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but huh?

    Clearly I missed a briefing somewhere. I thought that crocodiles were from that era, or is that the joke that I’m somehow missing?

        • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          No, the joke is that crocodiles aren’t dinosaurs despite looking like them and being around at the same time, just closely related, while birds technically are dinosaurs, just not the big lizards of 64 million years ago.

          • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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            3 months ago

            So really, this is not a joke about dinosaurs at all, it’s a statistics joke … which would put this meme in the wrong community 😇

              • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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                3 months ago

                I was making a joke about statistics not being science, but it’s clear that not everyone got the joke … pretty much the same as the original meme.

                (This is humour, laugh.)

                • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.net
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                  2 months ago

                  Statistics is maths, and maths is science insofar that you can’t do science without doing maths. And I’d further argue that statistics is perhaps one of the three most important branches of maths to science, the other two being linear algebra and calculus. Also, it’s been established previously that maths jokes are definitely welcome here.

  • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    I actually just learned this recently, but dinosaurs differ from reptiles in that dinosaurs have legs that are under their bodies whereas reptiles have legs that splay out to the side. So all mammals, and birds, with legs directly under their bodies are probably more closely related to dinosaurs then reptiles.

    • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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      3 months ago

      No. Tetrapods and reptiles diverge well before dinosaurs. All dinosaurs are diapsids as compared to mammals, which are synapsids. A dimetrodon (the one with the big sail) is not actually a dino and is more closely related to humans than it is to dinos.

      To expand on this concept, all dinosaurs and humans are technically considered bony-fishes as they are nested within the bony-fishes clade, osteoicthyes, but thats probably spelled wrong (this recently was used as a way of protecting some types of animals in a law that is supposed to protect fish as a category), and all birds are technically dinos, so when we refer to non-avian dinos, it just means dinosaurs excluding the birds!