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Asked by reem to Amy, Karen, Sarah, Vijay, Will on 11 Jun 2012.
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Sarah Martin answered on 11 Jun 2012:
Hi reem, humans are actually called “homo sapiens” in science, and are their own category of mammal, just like “mus musculus” is a mouse and “bos taurus” is a cow! Does that answer your question? Let me know! 🙂
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Amy Birch answered on 11 Jun 2012:
Hi reem! Yes humans are mammals, but I’m not sure I understand your question?
Do you mean how do we classify different mammals? This is actually a whole science of its own called Taxonomy. I’m not a complete expert on this, but as far as I know, taxonomists these days use something called phylogenetics to classify different species. Phylogenetics uses DNA analysis to find out how closely related one organism is to another. For example, all mammals are classified as mammals because they are more closely related to each other than reptiles. Humans are classified as primates because they are more closely related to chimpanzees, orangutans & gorillas than horses or tigers.
I hope this answers your question! -
Karen Reed answered on 13 Jun 2012:
Hiya Reem,
humans are indeed mammals – so are all animals that have hair or fur, give birth to live young, feed those young milk, have lungs and breath air and are warm blooded. As Sarah said human’s are called homo sapiens and we sit in a group of mammals that are called Placentals in that they use placenta during the growth of thier young. To find out which group different animals belong to you can either look at the features of that animal (does it walk on two or four legs for example) or usually these days you would look at the DNA and group organisms depending on how closely the DNA’s match. There is a whole area of science dedicated to this area (which I presonnally found extremely dull when I was a student).
Hope that helps.
Comments
reem commented on :
thanks for all the helpp 😀 all answers answered my question great! 😀 btw well done Sarah for winning 🙂