Post #2698922

The cat and the herring! I'm sure both of them would feel very uncomfortable about this. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, there's a strong case to be made that cladistically, there is no such thing as a fish at all. The bony fish (including the herring) are more closely related to all land-living vertebrates than they are to any cartilaginous fish (like the shark). Even worse for the category of "fish", by the way: Hagfish and lampreys are equally distantly related to *all other living vertebrates*. You can't really make a group of "fish" that includes both hagfish, sharks and herrings without that group basically becoming "all vertebrates". This would mean that whales are fish, which is obviously completely unacceptable.