Re:There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
by jwdunne on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @05:03AM
(#29635796)
And killer whales. Big, carnivorous and hooved with lots of teeth. Those are ungulates too.
Interestingly enough, Judaism uses rumination, in part, to determine whether an animal is okay to eat. It was called “chewing their cud”.
Pigs don’t do this and that’s why they’re not kosher.
I suspect this was the inspiration for pork being haram in Islam but it’s explicitly prohibited by name, rather than by property.
I’m not Jewish or by any means religious but I got curious one day and that’s how I learned what ruminants were (and even toed ungulates from the split hooves rule).
EDIT: clarity on comment regarding cetaceans as ungulates
Ungulates have hooves (horses, pigs, camels, cows, etc). Ruminants are ungulates that eat grasses in a somewhat unique way, by partially fermenting it in their gut, and horking it back up for another good chew or three (cows, giraffes, deer, antelopes, etc).
And I say "broadly" and "somewhat" because, to intentionally misrepresent the article's title, there's no such thing as a tree (of ancestry/relationships). Camels also ferment food in their gut but aren't ruminants, as do (I assume) other kinds of animals. There are a lot of parallel evolutions, genetic crossovers, and general muddying with any kind of attempted high-level grouping of creatures.
Did you know ungulates include whales, for instance? You know, those hoofed, herbivorous aquatic mammals that people are so fond of. But not seahorses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungulate
Taxonomies are weird. And it only gets weirder as we dig into them more and more, and keep making adjustments and corrections.