#And again - the show may or may not even pre-date this shift in taxonomic identification

[ailithnight]

Fun fact! He's only mostly wrong!

If we're talking taxonomy, which is a fair thing for high school biology to be teaching, the order Carnivora is divided into 2 suborders - feliformia and caniformia. In other words, one could say all carnivores are essentially either cats or dogs.

Granted, that's just the suborder. Seals are not true canids; they are pinnipeds. Plus, our understanding of taxonomy has actually shifted in recent decades to include genetic and fossil data. Before then, pinnipeds were actually their own suborder. And I don't know if that shift was before or after 2004. So...

Still, if that was the scientific understanding of the time, that's a pretty nifty thing to start a lecture about taxonomy with, no?

And say you had a student who was very smart but not paying enough attention, perhaps even half asleep during class; from that knowledge, it's not entirely baseless to say that seals are a kind of dog. It's just not quite right either. A true fun fact extrapolate beyond it's application to the point of oversimplification and misrepresentation.

I love that it’s technically fully canon compliant characterization that Danny A) once asked if seals were dogs because they bark, and simultaneously B) knows how to successfully land a space shuttle at 14 bc he does simulations online constantly. Truly one of the most Characters of All Time.