This was a topic I had started on another forum, and just curious about in general.
The term species works, but in reality looking at long time, it doesn't exist. We've found many fossils of various animals, and call some species like T-rex, triceratops and so on, but in reality what were seeing is a snapshot of a continual line of animals. We have species today, but what were seeing is a snapshot of the animal lines that exist today.
If we had a picture of every single animal from early bacteria bush at the base of the evolutionary tree, all the way up to every single living animal now along with every single extinct animal along the way, what we would find is snapshots of groups that we could call a species. Or even a line, say mine all the way back to the common ancestor of chimps and us, taking a section of the timeline you could say this was say aferensis, and this section past it is the next species. Of course the problem would be that the line is arbitrary, since if you took the section between the two you could call that a species just as easily.
Reason I say this is that as we keep finding with animals alive now, there really isn't any easily defined definition of species even using animals alive, what many would consider a species, like lions/leopards/tigers can still interbreed and ocasionally produce reproductive capable offspring. Plus it gets hung up on the creationists term Kind and get into semantic arguments. Is there a better word that could be used other then species, or some way to make species fit more what we actually see?
It's just a weird thought I had :> SOmething I had been wondering about for a bit.
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