#my confidence in my taxonomy knowledge after that interaction 📈

[musicalsiphonophore]

I showed a biology teacher my cuddly toy belemnite and she said “Do you know its Latin name?”

Then my own biology teacher (who is very nice and knows me well) said, “Oh I bet she does!!!”, then I (thinking she meant the species-genus name) said, “No, actually, I don’t; I think it’s just a nonspecific belemnite. That’s the thing with toys of lesser known things like jellyfish or octopus, they’re rarely a specific species.”

And then the less-familiar biology teacher said, “It looks like a cnidarian, is it a cnidarian?” and grabbed her and examined her!!!

I said no because she is a squidlike creature so she is a cephalopod, a mollusc, which is actually miles away from jellyfish on the tree of life, and as she lacks nematocysts she can’t be a mollusc and jellyfish are NOT like octopus and squid anyway.

I had to kind of grab her back.

Truly offensive; heinously misidentifying Belemnite and grabbing her by the shell without asking me!