xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs
Title text:
Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3204/
Clades are used for classifying birds and everything else, it’s just a little messier than the neat Kingdom/Phylum/Order/etc way of laying out evolutionary history. If you think of a species as being a specific pinpoint on the tree of life, clades are more like drawing a circle around a lot of pinpoints and branches.
But yeah, biology is nothing but ‘the last thing we taught you was an oversimplification!’ all the way down.
Yeah, that’s biology, all right. 😃
Anyway, thanks for the explanation. Never heard of clade grouping before. Is it handy for dealing with long extinct species, or why does such a grouping even exist?
Getting a little outside my area of knowledge at this point, but my understanding is the main reason is that clades allow for much more granularity than the Linnean taxonomic system. Linnean classification gives a maximum of 7 ways of classifying a species, while clades are only limited by the number of scientifically sound distinctions you can make between groups of species and their ancestors/descendants.
Example: check out the wikispecies entry for mallards, which are part of 40+ clades (hit the expand link under the Taxonavigation heading)
Wow. That list has cladus 61 times. So yeah, it really is system of grouping completely different from the Linnean taxonomic system. Well, there’s yet another rabbit hole for me to dive into.