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
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.
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