Pandorapedia Taxonomy Errors

[Raiden]

I saw this thread and couldn't help but intervene...

@ Patrice Maire:

Yeah, welcome to the club. I'm a Biology Major, and the survival guide and Pandorapedia are really kind of a joke when it comes to scientific names.

Granted, it's just a movie, but some of them are really bad. My favorite one is how the "Arachnoid" has three pairs of legs, not four (and no chelicerae to boot :P)

Maybe I'm hoping for too much, but I kind of want JC to come back and fix that by giving some of the creatures in the movie real Latin names instead of weird fake ones, and maybe make something resembling a phylogenetic tree for what we have so far for Pandoran organisms.

@ Ashen Key:

Yeah, that was funny...

While placing the Na'vi in the genus Homo was silly, even trying to categorize alien life by our own phylogenetic standards is kind of inherently silly. It's all we have to go by, but its still pretty dumb.

Like I said to Patrice, maybe I'm hoping for too much, but I'd like something from JC about the phylogenetic tree of Pandora and maybe something about Na'vi biochemistry.

@ TM20:

Keep in mind that amino acids are just the building blocks for proteins. The Na'vi have to have protein of some sort as their basic physical building blocks, it's just that whatever substance that codes for the amino acids that make up those proteins is something entirely different from our own.

It would also have to be something that can bond to DNA end-to-end and respond correctly to the multitude of enzymes and proteins that conduct repair and replication operations on genetic material.