Neapolitan

I thought the dividing line between one type of animal with another regardless how similar they are to each ofther is the number of chromosomes they possess. And generally I always thought that a species can only reproduce with it's own kind. There is always an exception to every rule e.g. the mule, being an offspring of a donkey and a horse, both being of different speciesfrom each other.

And since I'm following your orders not to look up any information beforehand, I have no way of verifing this but there is another example of a corss-species breeding I want to bring up and that is the "Cabbit," an offspring of a rabbit and a cat. I have no idea if the Cabbit is classified under the rabbit's species or the cat's species or does it share a dual citizenship between both species???

Another mysterious animal that is a result cross-breeding species is the "Camelopardus," which I became fimiliar with oddly enough not through Zooology but through Astronomy. I presume by it's Latinish name, that maybe in the ancient times the ancient Romans cross-bread the leopard with the camel for who knows what reason, but maybe they had a utilitarian purpose for it. By combining the endurance of a camel and the speed of a leopard the ancient Romans found a solution to quickly build their roads in record time using their hybrid animal that had specific qualities build into it that made it more advantageous to use then using a slow stubborn mule that would just hold up progress of said road building projects. All thanks to their scientific knowledge of cross-species breeding. The reason why I brought up the Camelopardus is that while modern scientist are endlessly experimenting with genes of animals (e.g. cloning sheep, cross breeding mules and glow-in-the cats) they've yet to reproduce an hybrid animal from antiquity.

The Cabbit and the Camelopardus throw a monkey wrench in the cog wheels of the machinery of science, when it comes to classification of animals by species. What is a "species" and how should we classify them, and their hybrid-off-spring? What is the critea for classification, and is it worth editting the hundreds of textbooks for the millions of students in the high schools across the United States when the definition is changed. It reminds me of the kind of dilema we had with Pluto's declassification from Planet to Planetoid.

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thomasracer56

Scientifically, a species is in the order below genus.
here's an easy way to remember it, tough it's missing domain:
King Phillip Came Over From Great Spain.

duga

My bio teacher got us to remember that as King Philip Came Over For *** Sex.

It was much easier to remember that way.

But...your response doesn't really answer tore's question.

I'm a supporter of the reproductive isolation bit. Unless someone finds an organism (say, an amphibian) that can breed with a totally different organism (say, a mammal) and produce viable offspring, I'll stick with that.

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

noise

not necessarily...

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my flac collection

Guybrush

The horse and donkey are still seen as viable species from the species definition that species are reproductively isolated. The reason is the importance is not on whether or not two species can create a hybrid, but whether or not they can create a hybrid which itself is capable of sexual reproduction. A mule isn't, so horses and donkeys are generally seen as viable species according to the sex-definition.

About chromosomes and using those, a lot of species are species simply because they were described back in the days when they had no way of checking this. Today we can check it, but if we rearranged species by this criteria, humans would be the same species as tobacco. Silkworm and elephants would also be the same!

They don't really throw a cogwheel in the machinery of science because cabbits and cameloparduses only ever existed in people's imagination. Cats and rabbits and camels and leopards are not capable of hybridizing together. They're intriguing fantasy animals, but that's it I'm afraid. Where did you learn about them?

Many fantasy animals thought up in the olden days were basically just mixes of other parent species. Some other examples are the griffin (lion, dragon, eagle), centaur (human, horse), harpy (human, bird) or hippogriff (deer, griffin), manticore and sfinx (lion, human) .. Creatures everyone who's ever played Dungeons & Dragons will be familiar with.

The Cockatrice for example is a mix between basilisk, lizard or dragon with a rooster.



At some point, medieval scholars thought they were created when a cock laid an egg and that egg then got incubated by a toad or possibly a snake. Needless to say, this has little to do with nature, but everything to do with imagination.

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Something Completely Different

Guybrush

In theory it works well for many organisms, it would seem, but it sure is hard to check since all organisms in nature don't occupy the same geographical areas and don't all have the same courtship behaviour and so on.

You get further troubles when you get to plants. They hybridize a lot and such evolutionary events are thought to have given rise to a multitude of the species out there. Another problem is this; imagine that species 1 can hybridize with species 2 and 3, but 2 and 3 can't hybridize with eachother. The sexual isolation definition would have to refuse and accept 2 and 3 as the same species at the same time!

This problem does happen in nature, sometimes involving a lot more species than 3. Brassicas are an example. Although I don't know for sure, I assume this must happen in some bird species as well.

I agree and if you flip the problem over on it's head, many species that should obviously be different look almost exactly the same. A good example is the phylum Nematoda (nematodes), a huge group of wormlike creatures that have differing ecology. Some are parasites while others for example live in the soil. However, they all follow the same general body plan and look similar to eachother. Two seemingly identical nematode worms can be further apart genetically than humans are to any other mammal.

So I would argue that both sexual isolation and similarity/dissimilarity are not good species criterias.

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Freebase Dali

I'm speechless.

Neapolitan

That is why I mentioned both similarity of the aminal and the number of chromosomes. I didn't say just the number of chromosomes alone. It's blatantly obivious that you examples (humans & tobacco; silkworms and elephants) aren't even remotely close. I meant similarity of the aminal and the number of chromosomes for donkeys and horses. Yes from a standpoint from of a pedestrian observer they might seem like the same species, but through scientific means we know they have different amount chromosomes. A horse has 64 chromosomes and the donkey has 62 chromosomes. Mules and hinnies have 63 chromosomes. Mules and hinnies together don't not have their own species classification but it's combined [Equus caballus + Equus asinus] right?

I don't know if it is the best idea to divided a living creature into seven ranks:
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. The number Seven is generally prefered because of the history of it being known as a mystical or magical number. Having such a system seems like science is relying on Metaphysics rather then a rational scientific schema. If Evolution is to be true such a neat system of diving life into 7 ranks seems to be a bit of an archaic notion. Shouldn't some species have 5 ranks and other species 500 ranks depending on how many stages it took of evolving into different animals to suddenly morph into it's present form?

While looking up information which was something you told us not to do in the opening post, I came across a fact I found out interestinly enough that a Camelopardus (which is a modern constellation) is named after the ancient latin word for Giraffe, a Camelopard. Infact a Giraffe's binomial name is [Giraffa camelopardalis.] You said it only exists in people's imagination. I will not celebrate the fact that you are completely wrong that a Camelopard isn't real, I'll compromise you're only 50% wrong.

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ikvat

The side of the road you drive on could be a good start.

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But who cares ?

Guybrush

Where are you getting this information from?

There are 8 major taxa in taxonomy starting with domain. By only the 7 you mention, there's no way to squeeze in bacterias the way they are currently classified Also, something like the flexibility you criticize taxonomy for lacking is actually present. Each taxon like family can, if needed, be split up into several ranks, for example you could take the family step and substitute it for all these levels :

Superfamily
Family
Tribe
Subtribe

I think this pretty much invalidates your criticism.

Then I will say Giraffa camelopardalis IS NOT camelopardus which must be regarded as a True statement and add that the name camelopardalis only exists in the minds of people - the imagination as it were - and therefore my previous statement is also true.

edit :

By the way, where did you learn about the cabbit and camelopardus? Was it something you learned during your education?

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