For individual traits perhaps yes, but transitional is generally used to describe all the traits that unify a species or other monophyletic group. Transitional is rarely used in relation to a single character state. There’s no one species that’s THE transition, the term is just used to explain that because of this species we now know something about how the unifying traits of the group evolved.
And yes, you are exactly right. It relies on having those two points, (not endpoints, like you’ve noted, just points,) and clear differences between them.
I was thinking about this and thinking of the ridicule that someone would face who discovered a new dinosaur in Alberta and called it “Cunning Egg Hunter” or in fact anything that made sense. At least in English, using a description (even a poetic one) as a name sounds somewhat childish. It’s only allowed to be a description if it’s in a language with no native speakers.
What I wonder is whether the Sesotho tongue really supports names like this (in which case good on the namer!), or whether the name is equally bizarre in Sesotho as it would be in English, in which case, the name is for our benefit at the expense of Sesotho speakers (“Oh look, I discovered a giant thunderclap at dawn left meta tarsal bone.”)
I’m probably being cranky (and likely unjustifiably so), but it feels a touch ‘orientalist’ that the only attention we pay to many languages is how they sound poetic to the English ear, ignoring that these are real languages used in science and commerce. I know it happens to English (see Japan), but English isn’t going to be harmed by people who use it exclusively for decorative purposes.
My theory, which is mine that it is: dinosaurs were little at one end, much, much bigger in the middle, and little again at the other end. That is my theory which is mine. That it is.
Also: big carnivore-types like t rex and allosaurus wouldn’t need speed or useful forearms if something like this or argentinosaurus (sp?) broke a leg. Just belly up to the buffet for however long it takes.
Yi qi (Mandarin; and one of my favorites, at least for now)
Correct. The issue with ancestors in paleontology is that they are not science —they are unknowable, in fact. Ancestors obviously exist, but knowing what they are is impossible.
So as it happens, ancestors are expressed in a cladogram by the bifurcations in the phylogenetic tree (where there are no labels). Transitional forms are all species in that sense, because they are depicted as being on the very ends of their respective branches — like leaves.
Even species which become extinct without descendants can still be seen as transitional in a sense, because a leaf on one side of the bush is still transitional relative to leaves on the other side.
Put that in quotes, then: “Giant Thunderclap at Dawn” metatarsal — names are placeholders, so there should be something to offset it so it reads as such. Once you do that, I, at least, had no issue reading it that way.
Species are named so they’re more convenient to recall and are also specific (Columba livia vs. “pigeons”). I mean, we could just go by specimen number, but that’s not always convenient if you want to talk about the group that individual specimen might belong to. (FMNH PR 2081 isn’t every Tyrannosaur, just one we call Sue.)
It’s not the difficulty reading, it’s the fact that in English (and I suspect most languages, but I’m happy to be corrected), names are symbolic, not descriptive, and thus it comes off sounding very 3-year-old. (Try reading it out loud with someone in the room.)
But in English, lots of things are named descriptively—and that’s their official name. The Wind in the Willows, The Hunt for Red October, the PlayStation, Gamecube, Players Handbook, the Art of Horror Stories &c.
There may be times when translation issues rear up and become awkward (at least in English), but we generally regard those as mistakes rather than ideal.
You don’t think the Giant Thunderclap at Dawn would make a kickass name for, say, a spaceship (in English)? I don’t see that as “very three year old,” myself but maybe mileage varies here. I guess I just feel that it’s appropriately evocative for a fearfully great reptile.
To add to this: what name would we give this thing if we just used English words? It might not be as poetic as “Giant Thunderclap at Dawn”, but it would very probably rely on the same sort of descriptive language. I mean, we call the place where you build a fire the “fireplace”. It’s not exactly subtle.
Crazy dinosaur? I thought that posts that make assumptions about anyone’s mental state without it being explicitly stated somewhere (either in a post or other verifiable source) are considered inappropriate?
