Maybe there is some yet to be identified or once was and it is now extinct. Nobody can say for sure and if it's the latter it would be impossible to tell from fossilised remains.
I'm about to be really disappointed if crab isn't the most animal animal... Edit: Beetles are basically land crabs, close enough. There is still enough time for them to complete their evolution. Soon, all will be crab
2:49 had to do a quadruple take at the mention of Terry Erwin. “Huh I didn’t know Terri Irwin specialised in entomology! Wow she must have been really young in 1982! Weird that they’re now using her maiden name since that was before she married Steve! ..... Wait who is this man on screen?”
Somewhat random aside: I've been stuck thinking about the original 'Sonic the Hedgehog' games lately. All the animals that you save from the robots are either mammals or birds (except for one level of Sonic 2 that has turtles) but the majority of the robots that you fight are modelled after invertebrates or fish. It's a weird dissonance where it's a story of nature versus technology, but the view of nature is skewed to being very mammal-centric. It's a bit weird to say about some old platform games, but it feels like a pertinent example of how some people view animals?
Yeah, it’s a problem called vertebrate bias, and it doesn’t just show up in video games-it’s a big issue in zoology research too. More time and money is spent on vertebrates (which as we saw are a very tiny % of all animals) than in inverts, even though there are so many more of them.
At one point, British biologist J.B.S. Haldane (though often attributed to Charles Darwin), was asked if the study of nature revealed anything about god. He responded with "an inordinate fondness for beetles"
@@jacobschuck3468 ex. Hank is a food crop native to North America, which was once thought to be poisonous by Europeans, but in fact Hank is not poisonous, hanks simply leeched the lead from the pewter plates that Europeans ate off of
i've always wanted to be a zoologist but never knew where/how to start! then i stumbled across this playlist and now im addicted! thank you crash course!
I staggered too, but looking at it now, I think I see it. Its "knees" are bent backwards and are in-between the camera and its butt. The joint connecting its red little stubby toes is an ankle? Then we go towards the butt for knees? No wait... The knees are the ankle, and the thing I called the ankle is where the toes join the feet? Idk. But it looks like it has 6 limbs probably because some joints are lined up like I said, butt-joint-camera
That freaked me out too at first! I think what appears to be 2 sets of back legs is just its legs folded back all the way and then its feet pointing outwards. If you look closely you can see its "knees" tucked against its bum.
I must say I love the content of this channel and I love zoology (i'm a biologist myself) but I shall make one critic: It is hard to not be Homocentric (thinking the human is the apex of evolution, or "the most evolved life") when you guys represent human on this sort of scales like in 1:57
Hey Leandro, thanks for the feedback. One of my goals in the series is to break away from homocentric depictions of evolution, which is why we showed that as a phylogenetic tree and not the linear scale that you are probably familiar with. We say that humans are a late diverting group (H.sapliens is about 200k years old which is not much) not that they are more evolved. Keep watching, I think you will be pleased with the upcoming episodes.
Why does the number of species matter and not the number of individual animals? Just because you can categorize beetles into many different kinds, doesn't make them more important.