7 Animals That Aren't What We Call Them
Picking common and scientific names is a puzzle of taxonomy, and sometimes we end up naming huge frogs "Mountain Chickens". So, let's figure out this puzzle. Hosted by: Michael Aranda ----------...
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There are lots of things in nature that we’ve given pretty odd names. Like, I know you know that seahorses aren’t mammals that gallop through fields, and sea cucumbers aren’t vegetables. The frickin’ strange geoduck? It can’t even pretend to be a bird. And the mountain chicken, it turns out, is actually a huge frog. But a lot of the time, we give animals certain names, because they look or act a lot like another kind of animal … so much so that we can’t really tell the difference between the two. Picking common and scientific names is a puzzle of taxonomy, the science of classifying organisms based on their biological traits and evolutionary history. A lot of what we think we know about the animal kingdom can be understood through what w...
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There are lots of things in nature that we’ve given pretty odd names. Like, I know you know that seahorses aren’t mammals that gallop through fields, and sea cucumbers aren’t vegetables. The frickin’ strange geoduck? It can’t even pretend to be a bird. And the mountain chicken, it turns out, is actually a huge frog. But a lot of the time, we give animals certain names, because they look or act a lot like another kind of animal … so much so that we can’t really tell the difference between the two. Picking common and scientific names is a puzzle of taxonomy, the science of classifying organisms based on their biological traits and evolutionary history. A lot of what we think we know about the animal kingdom can be understood through what w...
