And teeth developed from scales (no joke!) ;)
Nails are just vestigial claws.
Submitted 2 months ago by Dasus@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
latenightnoir@lemmy.world 2 months ago
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 months ago
SandmanXC@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sorry but it’s pretty well known that teeth developed because our skeletons wanted some air.
latenightnoir@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh, thank you! Didn’t know about this!
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
My ancestor must have suffered from some sort of scale baldness, as I congenitally lack 4 permanent teeth. We don’t suffer from actual baldness though, luckily.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As are hooves.
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
True enough.
Ever thought about how those work in the womb? They’re not hard to begin with and covered with a “capsule” (which is the same thing biologically we have at the base of the nail; the eponychium is the thickened layer of skin at the base of the fingernails and toenails. It can also be called the medial or proximal nail fold.
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Vestigial may not be the correct word. We do use our nails quite a lot for finer manipulation of tools
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It also serves to enable very precise grip in a way that a blunt fingertip couldn’t and to protect the fingertip from injury. It definitely isn’t vestigial.
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I mean… they’re definitely have a function. But they only serve those functions because they’re not proper claws. If w3 actually had claws, we wouldn’t manage such fine manipulation.
I think that’s more like a happy accident though. I was more thinking about toenails. My late father’s (RIP stubborn bastard) nails definitely were closer to claws than nails.
And that made me think of elephant toes. Did you know elephants are basically tiptoeing all the time, btw? It just very much doesn’t look like it.