this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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If you’re confused: Birds are dinosaurs, crocodiles aren’t; note the β€œclosest living relatives”

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but huh?

Clearly I missed a briefing somewhere. I thought that crocodiles were from that era, or is that the joke that I'm somehow missing?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The joke is that birds aren't only related to dinos, but are dinos themselves.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes and the cruel part is... Pterosaurs are not Dinosaurs!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

It might be easy to brush off my complaint as a case of paleo-pedantry, but word choice matters. "Dinosaur" is a word for a specific group of creatures united by shared characteristics and which had their own evolutionary historyβ€”it is not a catch-all term for anything reptilian and prehistoric.

We have known about this distinction for a long time, and I bet that your average 10-year old paleo fan would know not confuse the groups.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

So, it's a joke about the fact that both are essentially dinosaurs?

.. nope, I got nothing ..

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Here's my take:

Low IQ: crosc looks like dinos so they are the cloests living relative to dinos. Mid IQ: birds are direct descendents of dinos so they are the closest living relatives to dinos. High IQ: since birds are direct descendent they are just dinos, not a relative. Which makes crocs the next closest living relative to dinos/birds.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No, the joke is that crocodiles aren't dinosaurs despite looking like them and being around at the same time, just closely related, while birds technically are dinosaurs, just not the big lizards of 64 million years ago.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So really, this is not a joke about dinosaurs at all, it's a statistics joke .. which would put this meme in the wrong community πŸ˜‡

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No, it's a joke about dinosaur taxonomy. A statistics joke would still fit though, this is science memes, not dinosaur memes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I was making a joke about statistics not being science, but it's clear that not everyone got the joke .. pretty much the same as the original meme.

(This is humour, laugh.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Statistics is maths, and maths is science insofar that you can't do science without doing maths. And I'd further argue that statistics is perhaps one of the three most important branches of maths to science, the other two being linear algebra and calculus. Also, it's been established previously that maths jokes are definitely welcome here.

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