I think it's not about diversity, but lineage. The phenotype for "fish" is so ti... | Hacker News

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mutatio 12 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Eels are fish

I think it's not about diversity, but lineage. The phenotype for "fish" is so tight and well defined; a salmon is closer related to a human in the tree of life than to a coelacanth even though both are categorised as "fish".

Tagbert 12 months ago [–]

I think you got that comparison backwards.

A coelacanth is a lobe-finned fish which is the group from which tetrapods, and thus humans, evolved.

A salmon is a ray-finned fish which is a very different group. These groups diverged sometime around 300MYA.

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