https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis see the second sentence

If you follow the sources they explain that the species Anubis was thought to be based on (the Golden Jackal) was found to be more closely related to the Grey Wolf and is thus now known as the African Golden Wolf. If you go to the wiki page for the African Golden Wolf it mentions: "The wolf was the template of numerous Ancient Egyptian deities, including Anubis, Wepwawet and Duamutef."

Don't trust everything you read on Wikipedia. Anybody can edit it.

Anyways, we normally see an Anubian Jackal, and we tag what we see.

Archeologists identified the sacred animal of Anubis as an Egyptian canid, that at the time was called the golden jackal, but recent genetic testing has caused the Egyptian animals to be reclassified as the African golden wolf.

Well, it appears that what we thought was a jackal is genetically a wolf.

And on the African golden wolf page, it seems that they were once considered a subspecies of the golden jackal.

It was previously classified as an African variant of the Eurasian golden jackal, with at least one subspecies (Canis anthus lupaster) having been classified as a grey wolf. In 2015, a series of analyses on the species' mitochondrial DNA and nuclear genome demonstrated that it was in fact distinct from both the golden jackal and the grey wolf, and more closely related to grey wolves and coyotes.

I'm not sure about you people, but I don't come here for the phylogenetics versus phenetics debate.

Besides, this is a debate that is actually for scientists, as there are benefits to grouping by phenetics, so that things that act and look like wolves are simply wolves instead of whatever they're descended from, but this is less precise than phylogenetics, which are really cool computationally, but you can have results that don't necessarily make sense visually.

Phenetics are probably more relevant here, since we don't have biological specimens or access to the genetic code, mostly because we're looking at mostly fictional creatures.

It is correct because an Anubian jackal is not a real creature and never was. As a mythological being, Anubis is fictional, and does not need to depict the reality of any animal - especially not modern depictions of Anubis that can and will "get wrong" any number of long-established details about the Egyptian canon.

Similarly, if we insist that dragons (which are not real) are reptiles, then we aren't allowed to tag "dragon" on any creature with breasts, because that makes them mammals ergo not reptiles. This would be insolent and foolhardy.

Anubian jackals are a mythical being just like dragons, unicorns, centaurs, or any other creature founded on tall tales and mistakes.

FibS said:
It is correct because an Anubian jackal is not a real creature and never was. As a mythological being, Anubis is fictional, and does not need to depict the reality of any animal - especially not modern depictions of Anubis that can and will "get wrong" any number of long-established details about the Egyptian canon.

Similarly, if we insist that dragons (which are not real) are reptiles, then we aren't allowed to tag "dragon" on any creature with breasts, because that makes them mammals ergo not reptiles. This would be insolent and foolhardy.

Anubian jackals are a mythical being just like dragons, unicorns, centaurs, or any other creature founded on tall tales and mistakes.

Should we then claim hawks are fictional because Horuss is one and they happen to be the same word as "falcon" in some languages?

kamimatsu said:
Should we then claim hawks are fictional because Horuss is one and they happen to be the same word as "falcon" in some languages?

If Horus was thought to have been based on a peacock, and 99% of the time he was drawn as a weird sort of peacock, and we had a tag "Horusian Peacock" to describe that weird sort of peacock he was depicted as, and then it was discovered that he was based on a hawk, we would retain the "Horusian Peacock" label and distinction.

Clawdragons said:
If Horus was thought to have been based on a peacock, and 99% of the time he was drawn as a weird sort of peacock, and we had a tag "Horusian Peacock" to describe that weird sort of peacock he was depicted as, and then it was discovered that he was based on a hawk, we would retain the "Horusian Peacock" label and distinction.

And have you ever considered the Egyptians may have based the god on the animal, and not the other way around?

kamimatsu said:
And have you ever considered the Egyptians may have based the god on the animal, and not the other way around?

Clearly that's what they did. But I don't see how that relates to what I said at all?

If I drew Jesus as a velociraptor, it wouldn't matter that the Christian mythos considers him man and god together. I drew him as a velociraptor, not a man. Same basic idea - it doesn't matter what the mythology is based on, it matters what the artist actually drew. Whether that be a Horusian Peacock, and Anubian Jackal, or a Jesusian Raptor.

Clawdragons said:
Clearly that's what they did. But I don't see how that relates to what I said at all?

If I drew Jesus as a velociraptor, it wouldn't matter that the Christian mythos considers him man and god together. I drew him as a velociraptor, not a man. Same basic idea - it doesn't matter what the mythology is based on, it matters what the artist actually drew. Whether that be a Horusian Peacock, and Anubian Jackal, or a Jesusian Raptor.

What I'm getting at is, how does them drawing a jackal make all jackals fictional?

Jackal

canid, yes, obviously. don't know if i'd go about calling a jackal a wolf though. o_O i'm a bit skeptical of this claim.

kamimatsu said:
What I'm getting at is, how does them drawing a jackal make all jackals fictional?

There must be a misunderstanding here, because I never said that it did.

If it looks like a jackal, we tag it as a jackal. If it looks like a wolf we tag it as such. This is just another good reason why e6 doesn't imply characters to species.

treos said:
Jackal

canid, yes, obviously. don't know if i'd go about calling a jackal a wolf though. o_O i'm a bit skeptical of this claim.

Yes, jackals are canids under the Canis genus.

However, the animal previously referred to as the Egyptian golden jackal, which Anubis is presumed to represent, is now considered a wolf and not a jackal in the first place.

My response is that...

kamimatsu said:
What I'm getting at is, how does them drawing a jackal make all jackals fictional?

... this doesn't change that an artist drawing an "Anubian jackal" is still drawing a jackal - it's just a mythological and pretend one. They should not be forced to retroactively consider their fictional artwork to be of wolves (though they may do so if they like) because fiction is not firmly affixed to changes in reality.

Similarly, children's cartoons always have and always will make references to old jokes, tall tales, urban myths, and other not-real long-since-disproven things because, again, fiction. Reality does not matter.

My own work very intentionally makes changes to existing mythos, including symbolic or metaphorical adjustments to species, and I'll be damned if I'll let nerds argue with me about my own canon's right to exist because of the pretend and not real myths I loosely based them on.

This reminds me very sharply of the zoofurs and their insistence that all bird furries must have cloacae and all cow furries must have udders because real birds and real cows do.

It shows a drastic misunderstanding of the very basics of art & fiction.

FibS said:
This reminds me very sharply of the zoofurs and their insistence that all bird furries must have cloacae and all cow furries must have udders because real birds and real cows do.

I like mine to have accurate anatomy, but you're right, that definitely isn't happening.

parasprite said:
I like mine to have accurate anatomy, but you're right, that definitely isn't happening.

There's no such thing as "accurate" anatomy with fictional races.

Furrin_Gok said:
Don't trust everything you read on Wikipedia. Anybody can edit it.

The page provides a link to a PDF of the scientific report itself, which you are welcome to read.

FibS said:
Anubian jackals are a mythical being just like dragons, unicorns, centaurs, or any other creature founded on tall tales and mistakes.

"Anubian jackal" is not a real term. If you google the phrase you get a bunch of furry-related results, with the e621 tag being the most common occurrence. Unlike your other examples Anubis is an individual figure in mythology, not an entire species. I could maybe follow that logic if we defined an "Anubian Jackal" as a human body with a jackal head (much like how a Sphynx is a lion body with a human head) but that's not how the tag is usually applied.
True, a lot of furries like to riff off of Anubis specifically but I'm not sure that merits its own species tag. A lot of furries like to riff off of Sonic the Hedgehog too but we don't have a "Sonician Hedgehog" tag.

Clawdragons said:
If Horus was thought to have been based on a peacock, and 99% of the time he was drawn as a weird sort of peacock, and we had a tag "Horusian Peacock" to describe that weird sort of peacock he was depicted as, and then it was discovered that he was based on a hawk, we would retain the "Horusian Peacock" label and distinction.

Anubis does actually look quite a bit like the animal he was based on, particularly in the shape of the ears and face. We now know that animal is a wolf, not a jackal. Why wouldn't you adapt to new information? If Horus looked more like a peacock than the hawk he was based on, it might make sense to label him a peacock. But Anubis doesn't look any more like a jackal than the wolf he was based on, so there's really no reason to keep calling him a jackal.

parasprite said:
If it looks like a jackal, we tag it as a jackal. If it looks like a wolf we tag it as such. This is just another good reason why e6 doesn't imply characters to species.

If the scientists themselves couldn't tell the difference from looking at the actual animals then I'm not sure how we're supposed to be able to tell from looking at someone's art. I would also argue that "tag what you see" should take into account whether the character appears to be reference to Anubis, and tagging accordingly.

Personally I think aliasing anubian_jackal to wolf and then using the Egyptian_Mythology copyright tag would be the most "correct" option. If we want to ignore what's "correct" and keep it the way it is I guess that's fine too, there's just no logical reason for doing that other than following e621 convention.

RlctntFr said:
Personally I think aliasing anubian_jackal to wolf and then using the Egyptian_Mythology copyright tag would be the most "correct" option. If we want to ignore what's "correct" and keep it the way it is I guess that's fine too, there's just no logical reason for doing that other than following e621 convention.

So what do we do with the pictures already labelled anubian_jackal, since some involve egyptian mythology and some don't. That would require manually checking each one just to make the "most correct option" correct in the slightest.

RlctntFr said:
Personally I think aliasing anubian_jackal to wolf and then using the Egyptian_Mythology copyright tag would be the most "correct" option. If we want to ignore what's "correct" and keep it the way it is I guess that's fine too, there's just no logical reason for doing that other than following e621 convention.

Why not just imply it to canine and leave it at that?

kamimatsu said:
So what do we do with the pictures already labelled anubian_jackal, since some involve egyptian mythology and some don't.

Anubis is a figure from Egyptian Mythology, so anything that's considered "Anubian" should be related to Egyptian Mythology by definition.

parasprite said:
Why not just imply it to canine and leave it at that?

That honestly might be the most agreeable option. Can a tag have an alias and implication at the same time? So that if someone adds anubian_jackal to a post it changes to canine and also adds egyptian_mythology?

RlctntFr said:
Anubis is a figure from Egyptian Mythology, so anything that's considered "Anubian" should be related to Egyptian Mythology by definition.

That honestly might be the most agreeable option. Can a tag have an alias and implication at the same time? So that if someone adds anubian_jackal to a post it changes to canine and also adds egyptian_mythology?

Technically yes, however the alias runs before the implication so the implication never gets processed.

RlctntFr said:
Anubis is a figure from Egyptian Mythology, so anything that's considered "Anubian" should be related to Egyptian Mythology by definition.

You're running on the same assumption you are trying to prove.

kamimatsu said:
You're running on the same assumption you are trying to prove.

I'm not sure I follow

RlctntFr said:
I'm not sure I follow

"Anubian Jackal" has become an official (even if fictional) species, having nothing to do with Anubis himself. Take the Raptor Jesus statement made earlier, say it had a completely different form than other raptors; if people started drawing this "Jesusian Raptor" species without it being the character "Raptor Jesus," it would no longer be related to Raptor-Christianity.

Furrin_Gok said:
"Anubian Jackal" has become an official (even if fictional) species, having nothing to do with Anubis himself.

But, if it's not connected to Anubis himself or Egyptian imagery then what even makes it an Anubian Jackal? Is every canine with dark fur and long ears automatically an Anubian Jackal? If "Anubian" is in the name then doesn't it still technically originate from Egyptian Mythology?

Clearly I'm in the minority here so I should just drop it but I'm really struggling to see the logic here. I think perhaps there's some history here within the furry community that I'm missing.

RlctntFr said:
But, if it's not connected to Anubis himself or Egyptian imagery then what even makes it an Anubian Jackal? Is every canine with dark fur and long ears automatically an Anubian Jackal? If "Anubian" is in the name then doesn't it still technically originate from Egyptian Mythology?

Clearly I'm in the minority here so I should just drop it but I'm really struggling to see the logic here. I think perhaps there's some history here within the furry community that I'm missing.

We don't tag based on lore.

Put another way, we could also imply gryphon (or any number of other fictional species) to egyptian_mythology based on similar history. Sure, it's technically part of it, but is that really meant to be the focus?

parasprite said:
We don't tag based on lore.

Put another way, we could also imply gryphon (or any number of other fictional species) to egyptian_mythology based on similar history. Sure, it's technically part of it, but is that really meant to be the focus?

I guess that's fair. It just threw me for a loop because I figured that tag was for direct references to Anubis but I guess it's just its own furry thing like Sergals. I usually see the tag applied to characters with Egyptian imagery like the Eye of Horus so I didn't realize it was such a distinct concept.