• psycotica0@lemmy.ca
    1·
    2 months ago

    I don’t want to be a dink but, like, the photo is right there! And in that photo is an animal without tusks. So why did the cartoonist draw a walrus? Walrus aren’t sea lions.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Fun facts:

    • Seals are far more closely related to raccoons and cheetahs than they are to elephants.
    • Elephants are far more closely related to sea cows and hyraxes than they are to seals, raccoons, and cheetahs.

    Hope that makes your day nicer.

    • cypherix93@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Is there a visual graph for navigating animal genomes by “hopping” between them? Or like an ancestry tree?

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        You’re thinking of a phylogenetic tree, and whereas I can’t think of “jumping” between various points in a way that’s pragmatic, there is something like OneZoom. (Edit: Be careful if you have motion sickness.)

        Ideally you’re just looking at a tree of the taxon at the lowest level you can, in this case class Mammalia. (Technically infraclass Placentalia, but it’s cooler if you look at mammals as a whole.)