xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs
Title text:
Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3204/
Clades are used for classifying birds and everything else, it’s just a little messier than the neat Kingdom/Phylum/Order/etc way of laying out evolutionary history. If you think of a species as being a specific pinpoint on the tree of life, clades are more like drawing a circle around a lot of pinpoints and branches.
But yeah, biology is nothing but ‘the last thing we taught you was an oversimplification!’ all the way down.
Yeah, that’s biology, all right. 😃
Anyway, thanks for the explanation. Never heard of clade grouping before. Is it handy for dealing with long extinct species, or why does such a grouping even exist?