...you see a remark like this and can't stop yourself from openly starting a discussion about what "true whales" actually are?
Ishmael,
Clint Laidlaw, and
Doug Eldon unironically agree that dolphins are included among the whales (though the first two also assert that whales are fish and the third is almost certainly a creationist, so take that as you wish). On the other hand,
Suzanne Tate refers to “true whales” as a synonym of baleen whales, while the
Kratt brothers stated in an episode on the Narwhal that it is a porpoise and not a whale (it also implied that Narwhals not being real was a common belief and included a classic probability fallacy; it wasn’t one of the better episodes).
-Your favourite childhood animal was something 'weird' (like a warthog)
For me it was vultures (thanks primarily to “animal alphabet” media).
if you describe a pangolin to a friend and they reply, "Penguins don't have scales!"
“Not that this pertains to pangolins, but surely you’ve noticed penguins’ feet?”
If it really irritates you that when researching Charles Darwin quotations on Google the algorithm recommends several links to creationist/intelligent design/anti-evolution books.
I recall searching the names of mammal orders and seeing “EvolutionNews” articles along the lines of “The Abrupt Origin of (insert taxon here)” appearing quite high up on several occasions.
Which brings me to…
You may belong on ZooChat if you take issue with marsupials in general being considered “primitive”, “stupid”, or “maladapted”. This sentiment, based on the old orthogenetic or “ladder-based” conception of evolution, is present in such places as
Victorian magazine cartoons and a
TierZoo video (in which their intelligence is said to be capped by their lack of a corpus callosum, something also absent in birds and cephalopods, not that its author addresses those cases), and is linked to the further misconceptions that marsupials have no placenta at all and that eutherians evolved directly from marsupials (something implied by some modern
biology textbooks). The sad thing is that whenever this notion of marsupials being “less evolved” is shown to be inaccurate, a victory is apparently claimed for creationism: not only does evolutionary theory as we understand it not consider any currently existing species to be more or less “evolved” than another, but the same creationists contradictorily point to the current existence of “living fossils” alongside “more evolved” species as an equally good case against deep time and common descent.