User blog:Gilgameshkun/Question about camels and llamas (yes, I'm serious)

Does anyone think it is easily recognized in the general public that camels and llamas are more closely related to each other than they are to other groups of mammals?

You see, now we have many subcategories for Category:Characters by species, and to some degree these are taxonomically subdivided into different families of animals, but we currently strike a balance: If it's a grouping most people with a mainstream education have never heard of and aren't likely to search for, then we don't make a category for it. We may use more technical names for some of the categories, but generally people recognize the concept as a related grouping: Category:Ungulates are hoofed animals, Category:Carnivorans are cats and dogs and all the animals similar to them (like bears and hyenas), Category:Whales include dolphins, etc. The exception is if one established category is a proven parent of another established category, in which case we place the child category in the parent category, such as Whales within Ungulates, even if most people may not immediately be aware that whales evolved from hoofed mammals.

There are other groupings we do not similarly categorize because of a lack of readers' lack of common association for them, making them unlikely to search for them as categories. We don't have a category for (humans,, , ) because even though people generally know humans are primates, it's not as generally known that  and rats are more closely related to each other than either of them are to any other mammals outside of this grouping. Similarly, there is no category grouping turtles and, because even though they are more closely related to each other than either of them are to any other reptiles, people generally don't know this, and it's not like the most well-known extinct plesiosaur fossils had turtle shells. (It would take time for Pantestudines to evolve them.)

However, camels and llamas are both s, who originally evolved in North America, and only 4 million years ago (very recently in the history of evolution) did they migrate to other continents: Camels to Asia and Africa, and llamas, alpacas and guanacos to South America, and then camelids went extinct in North America itself. This would be a grouping that, going by biology, would have far more of a claim to have their own recognized category than many much better recognized groups, including apes which split from old world monkeys a full 25 million years ago.

But this is not a question of what camelids deserve, but whether you already understood camels and llamas were very closely related to each other. You don't have to know what a "camelid" is to have been aware of this concept. So, is this something you think people in general may be aware of?

Also, do you think this practice should be revisited? Should we have a few choice obscure categories like Euarchontoglirans, etc.? The existence of Eucarchontoglires was indirectly mentioned even in TMNT stories to explain why humans study rats in laboratories to better understand human biology&mdash;because a rat's body is so similar, biologically-speaking, to human bodies, so tests on laboratory rats help humans better understand themselves.