54
Firstly, it's not true that you can't tell racial background from DNA. You most certainly can; it's quite possible to give fairly accurate phenotypic reconstruction of the features we choose as racial markers from DNA samples alone and also possible to identify real geographic ancestral populations from suitable markers.
The reason that human races aren't ...
37
Well, that's just it, we don't actually have much phenotypic variation. For example, compare this:
to this:
or this:
Or this:
to this:
This is phenotypic variation:
So, as I hope is clear from the images above, phenotypic variation among humans is tiny compared to other species. We just notice small differences much more because, well, it's us so ...
31
In short, we do not think about the uniqueness of the second part of the binomial (the species epithet) but about the uniqueness of the binomial itself (the genus and the species epithet). Thus, the unique binomial of mango is Mangifera indica and the unique binomial of bee is Apis indica. For more detail, see this question.
To complicate matters slightly, ...
25
The concept you are referring to is speciation and it has been well studied in a wide variety of different natural organisms. I suppose here we are talking about the biological species concept.
The overall answer is yes it is possible, but critically depends on a few different factors. The reality of speciation in the wild is very complex, but these are some ...
20
The answer is that in general, self-naming is severely frowned upon in the scientific community, but the act itself is not disallowed.
There have been at least two instances of self-naming recorded in literature, as stated in John Wright's book The Naming of the Shrew, page 34, where Jules Bourguignat named a species of snail after himself as Ferussacia ...
18
This is mostly a guess and loose suggestion, since the picture is not very clear (would need to see the larvae in more detail). However, Bagworm moths (Psychidae), Case moths (Coleophoridae) and Caddisfly larvae (Trichoptera, almost exclusively aquatic) all build similar cases. They construct their cases out if silk and often include debris, pebbles and ...
17
Basically just search "thing you want" and "phylogeny" and you'll find a million results on Google. For you, I might recommend the Botanist in the Kitchen blog, which has a whole page on the subject and has assembled this phylogeny, including many, many others. It's pretty impressive!
17
3. is right thing to do. You can mention in the introduction that "Campylobacter fetus, which was previously known as Vibrio fetus [Ref] ........."
You should not use the old name anywhere again (also for the sake of consistency), once you have made it clear that the species was renamed, in the Introduction.
I don't think there is any written convention ...
16
I decided to summarize a competing hypothesis to make our answers more balanced. I also tried to address the question about the degree of human morphological diversity compared to other animals.
According to Woodley (2010), it is plausible that H. sapiens does not belong to one species and subspecies (i.e. is polytypic). Some of the data he uses to support ...
15
No. Nobody considers red blood cells to be prokaryotic, perhaps most importantly because they are part of a eukaryotic organism. Red blood cells begin life with the full complement of organelles, including a nucleus and mitochondria, but our RBCs shed their organelles during maturation. In actuality, though, only mammalian RBCs lack nuclei; other animals' ...
14
The plant is of Lamiaceae family and its common name is Shell Flower or Bells of Ireland.
Its "scientific" aka latin name is Moluccella laevis.
13
There is an International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, to which submissions for new organisms' names is strongly recomended. The discoverer does have some leeway within this system if there is no Latin name that well-describes this species. Your example is one of many.
Chapter 31, for example, clearly states:
31.1.1. A species-group name, if a ...
13
There are four other instances of species-level hemihomonyms I can find:
Agathis montana can be either a critically endangered species of conifer or a parasitic insect.
Centropogon australis can be either a fish or a plant with a long red flower.
Asterina gibbosa can be either a sea star or a type of fungus
Baileya australis can be a moth or a yellow ...
12
Bias
When you say phenotype you mostly mean "skin color", "size of the nose", "hair color", "shape of the eyes", "height", and some others. All these traits that we manage to find to explain population structure among humans. But you forget all the rest of the phenotypic diversity. If you would choose 1000 randomly chosen traits (external morphology and ...
12
The pollex was a Roman length measurement, approximately equivalent to an inch. The pollex was also known as the uncia, which is where the word "inch" comes from. There were 12 unciae in a pes ...
12
Long story short, use sequence information if you can.
The long story long:
Sequence information and the trees generated from them are strictly more reliable than morphological characters. For instance: sharks are pretty much the same shape they were millions of years ago, but they've been accumulating genetic differences 'invisibly' that allows us to group ...
12
That is the species name it is often the same for unrelated organisms, that is why we use a two name system. Binomial nomenclature (literally, two term naming system) goes Genus species respectively.
The first part of the binomial identifies the genus (which should not be the same unless they are closely related) and the second is the species name which is ...
10
This is a pond heron or paddy bird. The de-facto source for identifying Indian birds is Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp and Tim Inskipp. The book is remarkably complete and contains the vast majority of species found in the Indian Subcontinent.
10
It seems to me that many answers to this question suffer from the nasty habit of "political correctness". As a zoologist, I never heard of somebody sequencing the whole DNA of any species to decide when to use or not the term "race". If a group of animals comes from a side of a river, and the other comes from the other side, and they have one or a few ...
10
In practice, subspecies are often fairly loosely-defined, reflecting a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity at this level of taxonomy. There are systematists who take the view that subspecies-level classifications should not be used as they are not rigidly definable.
In general, a subspecies will fulfil the following criteria:
it will occupy a distinct ...
10
Yes, dodos were dinosaurs, but that probably doesn't quite mean what you think it does.
Dodos were birds, closely related to pigeons. All birds are dinosaurs.
10
Two different species can have the same species epithet if they belong to different genera ('species name' is referring to the full binomial name). Consider for example Pinus glabra and Ilex glabra
P. glabra
I. glabra
Two species can be have the same genus name (meaning they belong to the same genus) and will therefore necessarily have different species ...
10
I the first insect is a cricket, female Fall Field Cricket,Gryllus pennsylvanicus.
It is widespread across much of North America.They are often found around areas of human habitation.
The the coloration ranges from dark black to dark brown, although some specimens show a slight reddish tint. The black antennae tend to be longer than the body span of the ...
10
After tiring hours of research of not knowing what even is the second bug's order I've finally found the second bug as other part of the answer.
The second bug is Slender meadow katydid, Conocephalus fasciatus from order Orthoptera, also a female.
9
I bet you'll be interested about the concept monophyly. Any human-made group of species (or taxon) like birds dinosaurs, primate, bacteria, angiosperm, reptiles, … are either monophyletic, polyphyletic or paraphyletic. This picture explain the concept When the taxon is monophyletic it is called a clade.
Monophyletic taxon are those groups of species that ...
9
The correct latin nomenclature is Sander vitreus, with the genus capitalized and the species name in lowercase. This is known as binomial nomenclature.
Carl Linnaeus chose to use a two-word naming system [...] binomial nomenclature scheme, using only the genus name and the specific name or epithet which together form the whole name of the species. For ...
9
I don't know if these are his earliest descriptions but Darwin did describe several species of Planaria, such as Planaria vaginuloides, P. oceania, plus a new genus, Diplanaria in 1844.
Darwin, C. R. 1844. Brief descriptions of several terrestrial planariæ, and of some remarkable marine species, with an account of their habits. Annals and Magazine of ...
9
The tree in question belongs to the Araucariaceae family,
There are multiple species of Genus Araucaria,
I'd place Araucaria araucana on the first place, but there are multiple others:
Araucaria araucana
Araucaria luxurians
Araucaria columnaris
Araucaria subulata
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible