honey-nut clarity
No offence but some younger queer people heard "nonbinary is not a third gender" and interpreted that as "no nonbinary person identifies as a third gender".
And some people heard "nonbinary people are outside of the gender binary" and interpreted that as "no nonbinary person identifies as a binary gender. no nonbinary identifies as both 100% a man AND 100% a woman because that's not outside of the binary". (????)
And some younger nonbinary people seem to have internalised "well I'm nonbinary and I don't feel that way so you're wrong", even though the entire point of being nonbinary is that there's literally infinite ways to experience gender.
What I'm trying to say is, there's an identity entirely built around not fitting into narrow boxes, and yet a hefty chunk of our own community seems hellbent on forcing us into boxes anyway.
Annoying that dairy products are demonized as Unnatural and Disgusting when it's actually kinda neat that humans figured out a way to fulfill omnivorous nutritional requirements without killing any animals (and populations historically dependent on dairy even evolved lactase persistence!). This is biopunk to me
I've seen weird memes and stuff like "Milk is BODILY FLUID that came from a COW" and the fact that people exist that would find this distressing concerns me.
Y'all are not going to like learning what fruits are...
A fruit is an OVARY that because SWOLLEN AND ENLARGED after PLANT GENITALS were rubbed in PLANT SPERM by a BUG
CLADISTICS ruined my life
yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification
The choice is this:
Birds are reptiles
Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT
That’s it, that’s the choice
What if
Bird and reptiles are two different things
that came from the same thing
Nope
Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds)
So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles
birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily.
But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles?
I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.
It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification.
And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals.

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing.
don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.
Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it.
You are technically a fish.
IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all
hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed
Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators.
This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.
I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.
Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.
…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles
…which evolved from amphibians
…which evolved from fish.
*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken*
BEHOLD A LIZARD
you could have left the feathers on this time tbh
It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.
Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.
May I recommend the book “why fish don’t exist” by Lulu Miller
May I recommend
the book “why fish don’t exist”
by Lulu Miller
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Reblog if you are a fish
I got to work on a show with Ron Perlman about 30 years ago. He was just the kindest guy you had ever met. That shoot was real tough, and he is one of the good memories from production.
I've seen him maybe twice since then, and he's remembered me both times. It's something that matters, you know?
I hung out with Ron Perlman for two weeks, in Budapest, but I tend to forget that I ever hung out with Ron in Budapest, and would tend reflexively to put him in the category of people I have never met, because he was always in full Hellboy costume and make-up. Hellboy was incredibly nice.








