Friday, April 23, 2004
Lactal nipples? Huzzah!
You are a metabolic organism.
As such, you are basically a collection of replicative proteins that function according to metabolic chemical reactions and processes...
You are a eukaryote.
All remaining organic life is distinguished by structural differences at the cellular level between different groups of prokaryotes (which are essentially bacteria) and the eukaryotes (us)...
You are an animal.
...you are one of only about a half-dozen kingdoms of eukaryotic life forms. Unlike those of most other biological kingdoms, you are incapable of manufacturing your own food and must compensate for that by ingesting other organisms....
You are a chordate.
You have a spinal chord and every other minute physical distinction of that classification. You also have a skull, which classifies you as a craniate...
You are a vertebrate.
Like all mammals, birds, dinosaurs, reptiles, amphibians, and most fish, you have a spine...
You are a tetrapod.
You have only four limbs. So you are like all other terrestrial vertebrates including frogs...
You are synapsid.
Unlike turtles (which are anapsid) and "true" reptiles, dinosaurs and birds (which are all diapsid), your skull has only one temporal fenestra, a commonality between all of the vast collection of "mammal-like reptiles"...
You are a mammal.
You are homeothermic (warm-blooded), follicle-bearing and have lactal nipples...
You are eutherian.
Or more specifically, you are a placental mammal, like most other lactal animals from shrews to whales. All eutherians are mammals, but not all mammals are eutherian...
You are a primate.
You have five fully-developed fingers and five fully-developed toes. Your toes are still prehensile and your hands can grasp with dexterity. You have only two lactal nipples and they are on your chest as opposed to your abdomen. These are pointless in males, which also have a pendulous penis and a well-developed ceacum or appendix, unlike all other mammals. Although your fangs are reduced in size, you do still have them along with some varied dentition indicative of primates exclusively. Your fur is thin and relatively sparse over most of your body. And your claws have been reduced to flat chitinous fingernails. Your fingers themselves have distinctive print patterns... There is almost no other organism on Earth that matches any one of these descriptions separately, but absolutely all of the lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys, apes, you, and I match all of them at once perfectly, implying common descent.
You are an ape.
Your tail is merely a stub of bones that don't even protrude outside the skin. Your dentition includes not only vestigial canines, but incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and distinctive molars that come to five points interrupted by a "Y" shaped crevasse. This in addition to all of your other traits, like the dramatically increased range of motion in your shoulder, as well as a profound increase in cranial capacity and disposition toward a bipedal gait, indicates that you are not merely a vertebrate cranial chordate and a tetrapoidal placental mammalian primate, but you are more specifically an ape, and so was your mother before you...