When somebody says "seed", do you think mustard seed or coconut seed?

I think of a broad category of items including strawberry seeds, mustard seeds, sunflower seeds, mango seeds and other "pit"s, up to coconut seeds. I think "sunflower seed" would have been a better comparison, as its something a person can actually visualize, not a 3 order of magnitude spanning category.

The average person thinks of a mustard seed or some other small seed. I also think you know this and are being pedantic.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It’s just meant to give a rough visual. The article provides the exact length.

It fails to give a rough visual, though. The picture of it on a fingertip is much better for that.

Fingertips vary in size as well if you want to be maximally pedantic.

Yeah, but not through nearly as many orders of magnitude as "seeds".

If you leave out massive outliers like coconuts (which I highly suspect are not what 99.9% of people think of when they think of "seeds"—I realize that's not the case for you), I think the variation would actually be quite similar.

Poppy seed to mango seed are all "reasonable" seeds IMO. And that's a pretty darn large range, I'd expect almost all chameleons to fall within it.

The article provides a length of 13.5mm which is only 10mm shorter than the distance between the seed comparison and the reported length of the species.

> 10mm shorter than the distance between the seed comparison

This doesn't parse for me. You mean the difference between the two lengths of seeds I gave? Thats 150mm - 3mm, which is more than 10mm longer than 13.5mm.

I was going to make the exact same comparison with the mustard seed and coconut, but looking at the numbers, it more or less tracks as being the center of the log scale between the two seeds. Palm seeds in general are exceptionally large compared to anything else, while we're at it.

I came here to say the exact same thing. Who even goes around comparing things to seeds anyway? The writer was trying to be cute but just ended up saying something bizarre and stupid.