DNA testing is relatively new so I assume it wasn’t that. Did some scientists just go out into the wild and observe lions behaving like cats and think to themselves “I bet they’re related!”, or did they have some other way of figuring it out?
**EDIT:** By the sounds of things they just looked at them and guessed. Luckily they guessed right! Can you imagine if we’d spent all this time calling them ‘big cats’ only to have DNA evidence prove that they’re completely unrelated? 😂
In: Biology
I mean… you look at a cat and a big cat and you go “huh, those look the same but just differently sized… I bet they are related!”
then dna testing comes around and turns out they are!
this doesnt always work, but its what they did.
They looked at them?
And when that didn’t quite satisfy the urge they looked at the bones. And when that did not make things quite clear they looked at the rest of the anatomy. And then they looked at the behaviour. And after they looked at all of these things, they knew pretty exactly what they had in common and how they were different.
Edit: And I wanna add: how you dare to suggest that lions are not normal sized?
Long before DNA was identified, it was understood that convergent evolution (two species developing an analogous feature independently, i.e. not simply both inheriting that feature from a common ancestor) is relatively rare. Knowing nothing else, if two animals have whiskers, it’s more likely that both of those animals inherited those whiskers from the same ancestor, rather than two separate species both lucking into the random genetic changes necessary to make facial hairs function as sensory organs.
So once you observe that a house cat and a lion share nearly everything when it comes to adaptations (skeleton/musculature, instincts, sensory organs, etc.), it is far more reasonable to assume that both came from the same cat-like ancestor (which branched into two species of different sizes) than to assume that evolution “invented” what is basically the same animal twice, totally independently of each other.
It is based on type of species they are, and the same type of species they are that fall into a category like how multiple different animal species be determined on the same mammal, amphibious or reptile they are
Because they figured it out by doing a digging research and confirmation if they really are such as DNA testing, observation of behaviour, and anatomy too, and found out that they all the same, just jave different habits, lifestyles, even has mixed Dna, behaviours, difference from appearance and have different traits, skills and abilities, size, its muscles etc.
lol .. my friend… have you ever met a cat?
They have similar features, mannerisms, behaviour, looks, sounds, etc.
It doesn’t take a DNA test to look at a housecat and then a jaguar and start to draw logical conclusions.
The same way they figured out dogs and wolves were related? By looking at them?
Long before even taxonomy, people were very good in pattern recognition. Look at all the birds and frogs/toads that the long used common names already mirror their taxon.
If something was unclear, anatomy did the job. There are many anatomical features unique to cats.
We did it incorrectly for a while before DNA testing, we looked at things that were similar and said they’re related. That’s how we got mushrooms are plants even though they don’t have plant cells. But they look like plants.
We bred smaller cats from the big cats. we knew they were related because we artificially selected the small cute cats over time. Same wy we know wolves are related to dogs before DNA testing.
Looking at animals that look similar is actually a really bad way to relate living creatures because different species in similar envirnments often evolve the same features even being unrelated.
Well we call hippos “water horse” in Greek so I guess DNA is not really that important when it comes to naming something
They didn’t guess, they inferred. There’s a lot that goes into phylogeny. Behaviour, anatomy and physiology, homologous and analogous structures, breeding and embryo development and before DNA biochemistry was important.
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