Wikipedia: Mammalia/Talk

At the cappuccino? stand today, the trivia question was to name two poisonous mammals. I thought this might be a fascinating factoid to add to the article, but I didn't want to tamper with it at this point. One poisonous mammal is the [Northern Short-Tailed Shrew] (Blarina brevicauda). <>< tbc

Platypus Ornithorhyncus anatinus.

The male has poisonous spurs on its hind legs. One nerd point for me. :-)

Even more nerd trivia: poisonous or venomous? It's poisonous if you eat it, it's venomous if it eats you :-)

We have a layout problem, which I'm not sure how to fix (as in, I'm not sure what it should look like; this isn't a coding problem): as this page currently displays, subclasses look as though they are part of orders, instead of the other way around.

: The colons ":" at the beginnings of the lines control the indentation level. I swapped them so I think it looks correct now. --Alan Millar

Moved to talk:

"(Linnaeus named the order mammals for their breasts because he wanted to encourage women to breast-feed their infants.)"

: mmmmm, patriarchal hegemony in science. Why hadn't I ever heard this one!! --MichaelTinkler

Do whales have hair?

: They sure do! Just not a whole lot of it, and not necessarily throughout their entire lives. A couple links:

Re name "mammalia": I think I got this from Stephen Jay Gould. Not patriarchal hegemony at all--breast-feeding one's own infant rather than hiring a wet-nurse (or, nowadays, using formula) doesn't map particularly well onto patriarchy, though it does have class elements. I'll see if I can find documentation on this. --Vicki Rosenzweig

Okay, I did a bit of googling. At http://biology.uindy.edu/langdon/HUMANSTRATEGY01/24birth.htm I found "Lactation and suckling are perhaps the only behaviors found in all mammals and are definitive of the order. (Linnaeus, who created the name Mammalia, was a supporter of women breast-feeding their own children instead of hiring nursemaids; hence his choice of nipples, rather than hair or the placenta to define the order.)" That's a bio textbook; not conclusive, perhaps, but I think a neutral source. Vicki Rosenzweig again

: I'm the one who moved this quote to / Talk. I like it, I just question whether it belongs in the Mammalia entry. How about this: I think it says more about Linnaeus than it says about mammals - let's put it on the page of his article.

: Moved it to Carolus Linnaeus. What do we think?

: Makes sense to me. --Vicki Rosenzweig