#xkcd No. 3204
Date: 2026-2-6
Title: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs
Alt text: Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.
#xkcd No. 3204
Date: 2026-2-6
Title: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs
Alt text: Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.
Bony fish specifically but I’d argue that the common name for the clade bony fish is misleading and that bony fish aren’t a subtype of fish but rather a clade of animals descending from a subset of the non-clade category of things we call fish. Not all fish belong to a single clade we can call fish, bony fish descend from one of these unrelated things we collectively refer to as fish.
Basically, I would say the term fish is more like our term for tree (representing a niche rather than clade) unless you would argue all vertebrates are fish. We are a member of the clade bony fish so we are bony fish but we do not fill the same niche as fish so aren’t a fish. So “Bony Fish” is a noun distinct from bony (adjective) fish (noun).