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? 😂
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> 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? 😂
Thats actually the case for a lot of other cases, where unrelated species look alike due to convergent evolution and taxonists just wrongly classified them based on looks. For example, hyenas were thought to be related to canines, cos look at em, but further research has found they are more closely related to felines.
Other examples include falcons which were assumed to be the same as other raptors like eagles and hawks. But phylogenetic research has shown that falcons are not closely related to those other raptors, and in fact falcons are more closely related to parrots and songbirds.
Many things we call lobsters and crabs are not related to true lobsters and crabs. Like the hermit crab, horseshoe crab, and coconut crabs are not true crabs.
So there are definitely limitations to just grouping species by their looks and behaviour, and why genetic evidence has made so many changes to existing taxonomy.
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