Comment on Evolution isn't linear.
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Isn’t Chicken the closest living relative but not a descendant of T-Rex?
Comment on Evolution isn't linear.
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Isn’t Chicken the closest living relative but not a descendant of T-Rex?
Rinox@feddit.it 5 months ago
Yup, the T. rex is just extinct, chickens are the closest thing that remained after the cataclysms that wiped out pretty much all dinosaurs.
Same reason why humans didn’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that does no longer exist. This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons, depending on the evolutionary line.
Then again, I doubt any of these were intended as a realistic portrayal of anything at all, least of all the theory of evolution.
Enkrod@feddit.de 5 months ago
Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.
T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.
T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.
But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can’t evolve your way out of a clade.
But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can’t evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can’t evolve out of your ancestry.
Liz@midwest.social 5 months ago
I mean, monkeys are an evolutionary group. Technically, we are monkeys, as well as being apes, hominids, mammals, humans, tetrapods, etc.