this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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That last one hit best.
I'll constantly make entire spreadsheets to analyze the most random things, and then I get annoyed when my wife doesn't want to hear the summary and conclusion.
I'm currently on my taxonomy obsession. Does anyone want to hear about how birds are actually reptiles?
Yes...yes I do. Their legs are all scales but they don't shed. Pretty sure dinosaurs had feathers too.
Had? They still do! Birds are literally dinosaurs. Theropods to be precise. The same clade as the iconic T-Rex.
Yup, they did. Feathers rarely leave any evidence in the form of fossils or whatever, but I remember an article from close to 20 years ago now where they had found the imprints of feathers on a small dinosaur.
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Yes, please!
Okay, so the classic classification we all learned in school, that separates animals in Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species, was created by a guy called Linneaus.
Now, back in Linneaus' time, they didn't know about evolution, much less genetics, so he tried to classify animals based on the physical similarities he could see. All animals with scales in the same group (reptiles), all animals who lactate in the same group (mammals), all animals with feathers in the same group (birds), and so on and so forth.
Nowadays, though, we can use genetics to determine more precisely how related different species of animals are to eachother, and so comes a new classification, that puts animals that evolved from the same ancestor together in the same group. Which is the cladistic classification
Now a lot of animals did fit more or less with the linnean classification, but a lot of them don't. A lot of animals we thought were related are actually very distant genetically and only look similar due to convergent evolution, and a lot of the ones we thought had nothing to do with eachother turned out to be be really closely related.
Birds and reptiles are one such case. Both birds and the animals we more commonly consider as reptiles, are descended from the same ancestor and are currently considered part of the class Reptilia, which are all diapsids, meaning they have two openings on each side of the skull. Not only that, birds are descendants of a now extinct group of theropod dinosaurs called Archaeopteryx, which makes them living, breathing dinosaurs!
That's so interesting! I didn't expect convergent evolution to happen so often, I always thought it was a huge accident when that happens. Are there specific areas where it happens more often or is it combletely random?
Are all reptiles dinosaurs, or did reptiles and dinosaurs have a more distant common ancestor? I often heard things like chickens are the distant cousins of t rex or crocodiles are living dinosaurs. How much truth is there to that?
All Birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds. All dinosaurs are reptiles, but not all reptiles are dinosaurs. Crocodylians for example, are not dinosaurs
I'm not sure about chickens specifically, but as you can see above, all birds are part of the theropod clade, which is the same clade as T-Rex, so they are indeed closely related.
Convergent evolution tends to happen when animals face similar environmental challenges, because sometimes a certain body plan is simply the most efficient way to tackle these challenges. For example, if animal A and animal B both live in the water, and they both need to swim fast to fill their niche, they're likely going to evolve a similar streamlined body with dorsal and pectoral fins. Ex. Sharks, Dolphins and Ichthyosaurs.
My favorite example of how cladistics has changed our perception of animals is the elephant shrew.
We named it shrew because it's obviously a shrew, right? And the elephant part was just a funny little joke because of his big snout, even though it obviously isn't related to elephants! Well, it turns out that not only is it NOT a shrew, it is actually one of the closest living relatives to elephants! How crazy is that?
That is so cool! Are there any theories as to why elephants have grown so big when one of the closest relatives is so small?
Fun fact: I had to look up what a shrew is, since I'm not a native speaker. It turns out in my native tongue the name has mouse in it, despite shrews not being mice!
When i say they're one of the closest, it doesn't necessarily mean they're close, just that a lot of the other, more closely related ones, such as mammoths, are extinct. That said, the closest living relatives to elephants are actually manatees and dugongs.
These are still different animals that evolved to fill different niches though. They're part of the clade Afrotheria, which is very, very diverse.
For more information on why this is such a diverse clade, i'd recommend Clint's Reptiles' video about it: https://youtu.be/bO2DpSJtFBo
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Just wait until you get to the monotremes
I used to play this game called RAGE many years ago. It was a first person shooter, with a bunch of late game overpowered guns, had a crafting system to make ammo and the like, shops to sell and buy said ammo, but had strict resource controls to keep it competitive and fun.
So I spent around four days tabulating values of every ammo and crafting material in the game, mapping out which in-game traders sold what and when, and then spent maybe the next three days just craft-selling the cheapest item, a wingstick(basically a boomerang) in the game.
Hundreds and hundreds of wingsticks, grinding like a little kid in a sweatshop. I made enough money to max. out capacity on every ammo capacity in the game. As a result I breezed through the endgame, and what was supposed to be a long, tough, engaging mission into the heart of the enemy turned into a caricature of a boss fight, and I probably spend more time admiring the environment design there than worrying about dying or running out of ammo. I think I ran out only on one ammo type, and in total I used only the three most powerful ammo types in the game.
A level I should have enjoyed and formed the neat little bow for that game to be wrapped in, turned into a comical doom guy-esque slaughter of the scariest enemy in-game.
I am truly my own worst enemy.
It's like that saying goes. "Players will optimize the fun out of a game." Game studios spend many, many man hours on just this one aspect of development. It's the reason Skyrim's systems were fewer and simpler than Oblivion and Morrowind. I believe Todd Howard himself said they were trying to get away from all the spreadsheet inducing aspects of their games.
What they fail to realize is that optimizing and spreadsheets are fun for some people
Exactly. I stay away from EVE online because I know that if I start it, my life is over.
If it's any consolation, the last mission is generally considered to be the weakest part of the game.
Man finally someone else who enjoyed rage. Everyone is so negative about it every time, it was one of the coolest games ever (the first one). Especially if you like min maxing it!
It was a travesty what they did to the ending stages of the storyline. Man, for a while I kept imagining different endings to the game. Better endings.
Not a programmer.
I spent the odd hour a day for a year and half, googling VBA to make a multi-page report with pictures and such generate automatically after the import of a CSV file.
All so I could do 30 reports I was secretly backlogged on that would have taken me about 3 days to do manually.
After getting into Linux I decided I should learn programming too in case it's useful and I've been trying to slap together little programs for doing things like logging the weights of my tree frogs or data scraping image hosting sites. Coding is actually pretty fun for the ADD brain. Lots and lots of problem solving, a system to figure out, autism brain logic stuff, it's great.