Unable-Fox-312 t1_iy5en0l wrote
Reply to comment by Dorocche in Eli5: Why do birds and fish come in such a spectacular variety of colors and shapes compared to other animals? by thetravelman888
I was hoping people would search and find my favorite podcast. Obvs there is such a thing as a fish; for the sake of accuracy it's probably better to say for our taxonomy there is no branch that contains all the creatures we commonly call fish while also omitting every creatures we don't call a fish.
Dorocche t1_iy5et4w wrote
No monophyletic branch. But there's a paraphyletic branch, and a definition based on that won't be any less objective or consistent.
I have heard good things about the podcast, though
Unable-Fox-312 t1_iy5j9i5 wrote
I assume paraphyletic is a short way of saying basically the thing I just did: "there is a single fish branch if you're okay with a bunch of non-fish in it"
MrSquiddy74 t1_iy77s15 wrote
Sort of?
Paraphyletic is saying "everything in this evolutionary branch except these things".
Take reptiles for example. In common usage, it excludes birds, even though birds are a subset of dinosaurs, which are a subset of reptiles.
The exclusion of birds from the reptile "group" makes it paraphyletic.
Also fun fact! The most closely related animal group to birds is actually crocodilians (crocodiles, alligators, etc)
Redshift2k5 t1_iy9eyud wrote
it's a sloppy shorthand, fine as a joke but not an explanation
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