[IronBeer]

How about related university classes or three?

[High Max]

Only if you want to waste money and time. It's free to use the net to learn besides the bill of internet access you pay. I don't need to get a degree or take classes on it since I don't plan to be a doctor or biologist. The satellite channels are good for learning too.

[Black Wolf]

Here's the def of rodent:

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/rodent

rodent 
A noun
 1  rodent, gnawer, gnawing animal
 
   relatively small gnawing animals having a single pair of constantly growing incisor teeth specialized for gnawin


Is that all there is to the definition of a rodent? So anything with that description is a rodent or is the def leaving out some important qualities that make a rodent a rodent? Also, I think rodents are omnivores and eat bugs too, and I think being an omnivore is more evolved and adaptable than creatures that are only either herbivores or carnivores.

It's the teeth which make all the difference. Those paired incisors were an extremely potent evolutionary innovation, and allowed the rodents to spread out to pretty much every continent, and fulfill a bunch of evolutionary niches. That's the problem with "Rodent-like" incidentally - you probably mean "mouse-like" or something, but rodents come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes (think mice, rats, gophers, squirrels for different shapes, and then the Capybarras or whatever they're called in South America, which are sort of sheep-sized. Hell, if you go prehistoric you can find ones closer to hippo sized in South America). Shrews are morphologically much more constrained, and they're generally less specialized than rodents (again, see the teeth, but also other features like diet), so they make a better comparison to ancient mammals than something like a mouse, which is really quite an 'advanced' organism by comparison.

[High Max]

I also imagine raccoons and possums. Maybe even sloths.

When I say rodent-like, I imagine that small creature that was hiding in a hole while the T-Rex was out and about. Also I have a habit of picturing a raccoon in my head when I hear the word "rodent". According to what I know, the extinction of the dinosaurs (if you believe in the evolution theory or if the evolutionary history happened this way) is said to have created an evolutionary opening to allow for mammals to get much larger, and a while afterwards, they became much larger than the ones we see these days. Now they say that mammals aren't doing very well, probably from rising temperatures.

[Rian]

I also imagine raccoons and possums. Maybe even sloths.

Y'know, I'm not sure any of those are rodents.

[Black Wolf]

When I say rodent-like, I imagine that small creature that was hiding in a hole while the T-Rex was out and about. Also I have a habit of picturing a raccoon in my head when I hear the word "rodent". According to what I know, the extinction of the dinosaurs (if you believe in the evolution theory or if the evolutionary history happened this way) is said to have created an evolutionary opening to allow for mammals to get much larger, and a while afterwards, they became much larger than the ones we see these days. Now they say that mammals aren't doing very well, probably from rising temperatures.

You're broadly right, the majority of the mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs were small, probably nocturnal and spent, I would suspect, a large part of their lives avoiding getting eaten by dinosaurs, and there was a huge diversification following the KT. The only thing I'd dispute is the idea that mammals are struggling at the moment due to rising temperature. I'd be amazed if even 0.1% of the threatened mammalian species on the planet got that way due to global warming. The vast, vast majority of the problems they have come down to three things - overhunting (think whales, rhinos etc.), habitat destruction and introduced competition (be it foxes introduced into Australia killing all the woylies or humans fishing out a river so otters can't egt enough food).

I also imagine raccoons and possums. Maybe even sloths.

Y'know, I'm not sure any of those are rodents.

They're not - Possums are marsupials, I think raccoons are some kind of carnivoran and I have no idea where sloths fit, but i'd imagine they'd be some little branch off on their own. They're weird. But they're definitely not rodents.

[Flipside]

I think Sloths are distantly related to Anteaters, which are a sub-group all on their own, but I'm not certain on that.

[Stealth]

Stealth I'm going to ignore because he should know the answer by now, and it's impossible to change the willingly ignorant.

It was clearly a joke.

If you didn't get that, then i'm not the ignorant one here

[Davros]

Snuffleupagus !!!

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