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Whales is whales
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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Wait, seals are sea doggos, right? Whales are sea cows.
Cetaceans evolved from a wolf like creature, not a bovine like one.
Did they? Wiki tells me "that cetaceans are phylogenetically closely related with the even-toed ungulates (Artiodactyla)". So a horse is closer than a cow, but a cow is much closer than a dog. By the way, I like the fact that we're both angry :)
It depends on what you want to call pakicetus, I think it looks kinda dog like.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/
The DNA may tell an entirely different story.
Pakicetus looks really cute in this reconstruction! I've always seen the species pictured looking as a kind of a big rat. This is so much better.
But manatees are sea cows
They are called sea cows, but they're really sea elephants? I hope I'm not terribly wrong.
Why elephants? I mean whales are not cows just by looking at what they eat. In that way manatees eating mostly sea plants are closer to being cows. Are they not?
I think it's a joke about manatees having evolved from the same land-based ancestor as elephants, making them pretty literally "sea elephants".
Yes, I was referring to the evolutionary aspects, not the ecological ones :)
Interesting. Just like the actual closest living relative to the elephant looks like a malnourished beaver