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They Want to Break T. Rex into 3 Species. Other Paleontologists Aren’t Pleased
- kgwxd 5y agoMake Pluto a planet again and you can have your new Tyrannosauruses.
- edgyquant 5y agoI get that you’re joking but ffs it’s been two decades and we have good reason for Pluto to be a dwarf planet.
- mattmoose21 5y agoOh yeah, name 4 good reasons. /s
- edgyquant 5y agoEris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong
- ithkuil 5y agoLet's make them all planets! Let's fight for the small planet against the tyranny of the giants! First they came for Pluto and I didn't speak out because ...
- captainbland 5y agoWe should demote Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars for being too small. I'm tired of these terra-centric definitions!
- DocTomoe 5y agoGood reasons beyond "hey, if we make all the new objects planets, children will have to learn a lot more names in that completely pointless exercise to know all the planets?"
- edgyquant 5y agoClassifications exist for a reason. If we considered everything big enough to be a sphere a planet then the term would be close to useless.
- dragonwriter 5y agoI mean, we called the things we currently just call “planets” “major planets” instead, and include “dwarf planets” as an additional subsets of planets instead of a separate category, and the terminology would be more consistent. It would be a good way to complete the terminology shift that split what used to be minor planets into dwarf planets and small solar system bodies (including reclassifying Pluto as a dwarf planet.)
- memorydial 5y agoThanks Jerry!
- dopylitty 5y agoWhenever I see this need for somewhat arbitrarily classifying things into categories I wonder what the purpose is. For example there was a long period of time when viruses were classified by the diseases they caused. So you had enteroviruses that cause GI diseases and rhinoviruses that cause respiratory diseases. When gene sequencing became possible it turned out a lot of these entero and rhino viruses are closely related, something that has implications for how they can be treated and how cross-immunity works. Meanwhile the various hepatitis viruses aren’t as closely related. So for viruses a useful classification might be based on which treatments work or which viruses elicit cross immunity. So getting back to classifying dinosaurs and dwarf planets the question is what value the classification brings. Does classifying them make them easier to study somehow?
- ggm 5y agoIf you treat things as forking branches in a tree, then refinement of branching in deep time, is informing of why modern developments diverge. You might have 4 things held to have a common ancestor and uncover 3 of then from one lineage and 1 from an earlier fork. This may for instance explain why Chimps are remarkably non-verbal for otherwise smart creatures. It's why we're confident about the lineage to Homo Sapiens but the detail of Denisovan, Neandertal is huge. What if we unpacked a pre-lingual ancestor? What might it say if they were not toolmakers beyond the crow-trivial level, and what comes after were? Would we be able to tie tool making to vocalisation? I don't think this is the only reason, and I have no belief T-Rex progeny do more than inform marginally KFC cooking times and relative fat content of duck and goose..
- vimax 5y agoIn code terms, knowing the history of a codebase is often more important than knowing the current feature set it provides.
- hulitu 5y ago> Whenever I see this need for somewhat arbitrarily classifying things into categories I wonder what the purpose is. The purpose is to get more money. Imagine they have 3 T. Rex skeletons. Then instead of 3 T. Rex, they have a T. Rex, a T. King and a T. Czar much better than the shop around the corner.
- threwto 5y ago