Considering horses (and thus horseshoes) came way after the horseshoe crab, we really should rename the horseshoe to "crab shoe" or something and "horseshoe crab" to something else. Ideas welcome.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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I’m in favour of renaming horses to crab feet.
Yeah I was gna say something like this - the crab is on the other foot, if you get my drift
Agree, they don't seems Horse shoes, they are not even crabs or crustaceos, Arrow Tail Scorpion or Spider would maybe the biological most exact name.
angry hissing crab? nah that's all of them. alexa how do you say pointy butt crab in esperanto? we gotta use dead languages to name our creatures
That’s not how evolution works. Today’s horseshoe crabs may look very similar to their ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t evolve. I know it’s just a meme and not that serious, but misconceptions about evolution seem to be very common and I think that’s a shame.
Apologies for ignorance, but what changed about them? Is it that they’ve been evolving over millions of years, which is why they can survive in today’s world (even though they look the same).
Basically that; I'd imagine their immune systems are more complex nowadays just because the threats are
also some of them got racing stripes
edit: 
And then, they went on to get rear spoilers... guns with silencers... blockchain...
Similar to how humans and apes have a common ancestor, the horseshoe crabs would have an ancestor which looked very similar to today's version, although slightly different, and some of them would have evolved into other things while some remained relatively unchanged.
As well, they look the same phycially but the DNA has changed significantly, potentially just internal things or chemical/biological processes etc.
Yeah, taxonomic classification always falls short of the natural world. It may be the same taxonomy, but that doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same.
Hell, if we only had dog fossils to work with, different breeds would almost certainly be considered entirely different species. But as it currently stands, they’re all the same species, (canis lupus familiaris), because we know the different breeds can mate with each other and produce viable offspring.
their genome would look different if nothing else, different genes causing the same features.
i'd imagine there are all kinds of tiny tiny differences, like the shell changing shape and behaviours altering over time so they don't get horribly confused as the earth changes shape.
Every animal in the comic should be a horseshoe crab.
We need to see a subtle shift where one more character evolves into a crab between each panel of the comic.
I see a trilobite and an ammonite in there, did those guys even leave any evolved descendants before they went extinct?
Yes, but those also went extinct.
Except Nautili still exist today
nautilussies
Nautilus having second thoughts ...
The horseshoe crab denied evolution, so we've begun to forcefully take their blood sacrifice instead
This reminded me to sit up straight.