That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.
These
are more genetically compatible than These
and that’s why morphology-based phylogeny has Issues
The problem is perspective. People always think dogs are the ‘standard’ animal, the metric to use for whether or not two organisms “look like” they’re related. When in fact they’re a massive outlier due to the fact that we fucked up this lineage of wolf beyond recognition with selective breeding. It’s why people always say “breed” when they mean “species”, especially when talking about groups like lizards which can’t even be defined cladistically since some of them are closer to snakes than each other. To say nothing of fish.
I once read an article that emphasized there is no such thing as a fish. Sharks and rays, lamprey, lobe-finned fish like lungfish and coelacanth, bichir and sturgeon, and of course the multiple infraclasses of more “modern” fish groups are all only very distantly related to one another. They’ve maintained semi-similar body structures only because there are limited ways to efficiently move through water as a vertebrate.
This
And this
Are more distantly related from one another than you and I are from a lungfish
Which is absolutely fuckin wild.
Not only that, but all of us air-breathing land vertebrates, all the lizards and chickens and people and frogs, are closer to one another than those three “fish” are to one another as well.
