The (not really) Official Endgame Summon Thread!

[HoneyBadger]

There seems to be a bit of confusion between "animals" and "mammals" or atleast lower (single celled, simple invertibrates, etc.) and higher (multi-celled: insects, lizards, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, etc) animals.

Every living thing started out as an animal. Plants evolved *after* animals did, and infact were the cause of one of the earliest mass extinctions on the planet when they did evolve, because at the time oxygen was a deadly poison to most forms of animal life. There are still animals on Earth which survive and flourish in anoxic conditions, such as the bacteria that cause gangrene or boccilism.

Note: A biologist I am not, nor am I a geneticist. So I'm not claiming to know for certain, but to my latest understanding, plants, mammals, and higher forms of animals that are related to mammals, are closer genetically than we are to some other forms of animals, including several different types of bacteria, and other very primitive orders of animal, which may have split off into separate families before plants even existed.