Post #2698930

2026-05-15 01:32 UTC

@datarama@hachyderm.io it makes sense in that there is a high correlation that if you like reptiles, you probably like amphibians, and vice versa. Scientific fields are organized according to human interest more than anything else.

Replies (1)

@datarama@hachyderm.io 2026-05-15 06:35

@munificent@mastodon.social There's also a historical reason: Before all the discoveries and inventions that led to modern cladistics, we *thought* reptiles and amphibians belonged together. In the pre-evolutionary taxonomies (all the way back to Aristotle's), reptiles and amphibians would often get grouped together as a kind of "lower animals". And this intuitively makes a kind of sense, because there are a few important ways where they are unlike us but similar to each other - the big one, of course, is that both are exothermic. Lizards and salamanders even look like each other if you squint a bit. (Personally, as a reptile nerd, I don't really like amphibians more than I like other non-reptile animals. And this is actually also not unusual among actual professional herpetologists - they tend to divide pretty sharply into reptile specialists and amphibian specialists.)

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