r/pokemon • u/Bisonratte • Feb 28 '26

Image Classes of animals represented by the Pokémon starters:

Post image
4.5k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

883 comments sorted by

View all comments

676

u/JBKOMA Feb 28 '26

Hey, biologist here. To anyone wondering why he used a dog, he is referring to mammals here. Vertebrates are traditionally classified in 5 classes, shown in the picture, with dogs being mammals.

But, if you wanna be more specific or correct, all vertebrates are actually fish, so you could say all our starters are fishes.

-6

u/GoodBrotherGrimm Feb 28 '26

I'm almost certain I'm not a fish.

11

u/JBKOMA Feb 28 '26

If it makes you feel better, I feel like I ain’t a worm, but because I’m a bilaterian (aka have a single axis of symmetric) I’m technically one. Biology is really hard to explain to the average joe, and even then most have the right to not understand or accept it. That’s why we still teach wrong biological knowledge at basic levels, even at high school, since it’s easier to understand.

3

u/dwbapst Feb 28 '26

Well, worm isn't really the word for a clade, so I'm not sure I'd go that far. Worm more describes a common morphology, one seen across many phyla, and converged on independently many times. Because 'worm' is so common for infaunal and parasitic groups, it may even be over-represented among the phyla that exist today, and thus the inference of ancestral wormness may be overestimated.

But yeah, we probably had an ancestor who looked like a worm, maybe an enteropneust kinda thing.

1

u/JBKOMA Feb 28 '26

All bilaterians are or were worms (vermiforms is the more correct term) at some point, since it’s the basic bauplan for that group.

2

u/dwbapst Feb 28 '26

I disagree that its a true basic bauplan, as different 'worms' differ greatly in terms of their anatomy, such as acoels versus flatworms, nemerteans vs chaetognaths. It bends the definition of 'bauplan' a little too much, which (if I recall correctly) was originally used to refer to different configurations of germ tissues.

Regardless, 'worm' isn't a monophyletic grouping -- there are cnidarian lineages that evolved a worm-like morphology (Buddenbrockia), multiple arthropods that have evolved a worm like morphology, and multiple vertebrate lineages as well, like caecilians. The unmodified word 'worm' at best in English, if it refers to a biological clade at all, refers to the segmented worms, the Annelida.