adventurecoreadjacentbabe

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

This is open for public comment until the end of May 19th. Please comment and make your voice heard.

Well here is the indochinese spotted giant flying squirrel

And here is the zanj sun squirrel

and heres the calabrian black squirrel

and heres the bornean mountain squirrel

And this is taiwanese red and white giant flying squirrel

And here is washington ground squirrel

This is a huge thing in birds where males get the vast majority of the attention since they often have more visually striking plumage. I personally think the female red-winged blackbird is the most commonly misidentified bird in North America because of this problem.

A side effect of this phenomenon is that a lot of the time bird art depicts only males, so I LOVE when I get to see belted kingfisher art and be like omg it’s her!!!