Next you'll tell me monarch butterflies are neither monarchs, nor butter, nor flies
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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That would technically make them lies...
That ended perfectly and I feel like one of today's lucky 10.000 after this, thx!
Methinks there's more than 10,000 of us
Today. Tomorrow's batch won't be ready until tomorrow.
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.
Homo sapiens are actually heterosexual on average :(
With your help, we can work on changing that!
Only YOU can prevent heterosexuality
Most humans have zero partners of the same sex per year. Homos Georg, who lives in a cave and has 50,000 homosexual partners a year, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
The Mountain Goats (the band) are fucking great, though, even if they aren't, in fact, goats.
Is there a sub/replacement/someotherterm for them?
Uhhh, you could try mewithoutYou, Neutral Milk Hotel, or maybe Cloud Cult? Those are all pretty close, but on slightly different axes.
I love that you just described the bands I listen to!
I took the Mal Blum avenue and ended up with Great Grandpa. Highly recommend.
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.
Who reigns from the Court of the Crimson King?
Easy Money.
Equally confusing is the hen of the woods, which is not a hen, nor, in fact, is it an animal at all.
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.
Is it a raptor that preys on monkeys?
Strangely enough it's a type of goat
Yes. The Philippine Eagle
Also, those flightless aquatic birds most people call penguins are not actually that. Penguins are extinct.
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.
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!
Nowhere did I claim that Sphenisciformes were related to Alcidae,
This debate boils down purely to word usage and prescriptivism vs descriptivism; which order/family of seabirds does the term "penguin" refer to? Who cares! This is entirely Argumentum ad Dictionarium!
I didn't consider it a debate in the first place, but yes, I'm aware of how the words have changed in their application. That seemed to be a central theme of the entire post 🤷
Ok, have a nice day
What?!?
Essentially there was a species of birds called the great awks which most people called penguins, the 'only modern species in the genus Pinguinus' that humans hunted to extinction in the ~~late 1700's~~ mid 1800's. What we call penguins today were only named that because of their resemblance to these extinct birds
Ahhhh, thank you!
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!
Chickety mountain, the mountain chicken.
ok mountain goats aren't the same species as a domesticated goat but that seems intuitive to me. and they're pretty closely related...