• @[email protected]
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    617 hours ago

    Equally confusing is the hen of the woods, which is not a hen, nor, in fact, is it an animal at all.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 hours ago

      Per Wikipedia:

      Despite its vernacular name and both genera being in the same subfamily (Caprinae), the mountain goat is not a member of Capra, the genus that includes all true goats (such as the wild goat (Capra aegagrus), from which the domestic goat is derived); rather, it is more closely allied with the other bovids known as “goat-antelopes”, including the European chamois (Rupicapra), the gorals (Naemorhedus), the takins (Budorcas) and the serows (Capricornis), of Japan and eastern South Asia.

  • @[email protected]
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    423 hours ago

    I’ve had to scoot past a family of mountain goats at 14.5k feet on a ridge with cliffs on both sides, and let me say that papa goat was 300 lbs of muscle and was definitely the GOAT!

  • @[email protected]
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    81 day ago

    I remember reading Safari Cards as a kid and found the Monkey Eating Eagle.

    Turns out it’s not a monkey that preys on raptors.

  • Fushuan [he/him]
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    1 day ago

    so Ibexes are european “mountain goats”, and are true goats, but “mountain goats”, are american mountain goats and not goats. Okay. Fuck your english. All my mountain goats are goats.

    So yall basically decided that since your fake goat was already named “mountain goat”, all the actual mountain goats in europe couldn’t be names as such and used a weird ass name for them. Goooot it.

    Looking it up, the “ibex” name comes from them being from the iberian peninsula, which is true for some of them but there’s goats in every mountain, not only in the iberian peninsula… Shame… Shame.

  • @[email protected]
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    192 days ago

    The Mountain Goats (the band) are fucking great, though, even if they aren’t, in fact, goats.

  • @[email protected]
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    152 days ago

    I’m a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves, I’ll give you a topic. The king cobra is neither a king, nor a cobra. Discuss.

  • sqw
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    023 hours ago

    ok mountain goats aren’t the same species as a domesticated goat but that seems intuitive to me. and they’re pretty closely related…

  • @[email protected]
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    61 day ago

    Also, those flightless aquatic birds most people call penguins are not actually that. Penguins are extinct.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 hours ago

      Penguins are penguins. [citation not needed]

      Penguins are not extinct. [1] [2] [3]

      While it is true that great auks are extinct, and that the word “penguin” originally referred to them, the word possibly comes from Latin pinguis (fat) or Welsh pen gwyn (white head). [4]

      Penguins do have fat, and some penguins have white heads, so the word applies to them just as much as it applies to great auks. [citation not needed]

      The word “penguin” was used to refer to flightless aquatic birds of the order Sphenisciformes as early as the 16th century. [4]

      Also, auks other than the great auk are not extinct. The closest living relative to the great auk is the razorbill, Alca torda, in the family Alcidae, the auks. Other auks include the little auk, the parakeet auklet, and the puffin.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 hours ago

        You didn’t watch the video 🤦 Wikipedia is not a superior source to an actual expert. And species are not categorized based on etymology (which wouldn’t work here anyway as some “penguins” have all-black heads).

        The video is from a PhD Biologist & Zoologist who has made a ton of content on the joys and challenges of phylogeny, and he clearly has a love for these creatures. It’s worth a watch if you enjoy this stuff.

        Yes, Great Auks were the original “penguins” and they lived in the northern hemisphere. He makes the point that those are more closely related to hummingbirds than they are to what we now call penguins. And the modern “false penguins” (to be a bit cheeky), which live almost exclusively in the southern hemisphere, are more closely related to flamingos and other colorful flighted birds than they are to any auks.

        So in terms of avian ancestry they are not even very closely related. So yeah, (original) penguins are extinct. Long live (new) penguins!