Wikipedia Trail: From Lions to Alexander the Great

LION
I picked lion to start out with because I read some Aesop's Fables that were about lions. Lions are big cats that are part of the felidae family. There are eight different subspecies of lions that are recognized today. They can be mostly found in the wild in Africa.

HERACLES
Heracles (also known as Hercules) is a Greek mythological character. He is a demigod whose father was Zeus and whose mother was Alcmene. He is one of the most famous demigods. At one point in his life Hera caused Hercules to go mad and kill his family. He wanted to pay for his crimes so he set out to accomplish ten tasks. Two of the tasks weren't accepted so he had to do a total of twelve tasks.


Hercules and the Nemean Lion

MARES OF DIOMEDES
The mares of diomedes were man-eating horses from Greek mythology. They were wild and uncontrollable horses that belonged to Diomedes, who was the king of Thrace. These horses were apart of Hercules' eight task.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Alexander was the king of the ancient kingdom of Macedon. He led to Greeks in a conquest of Persia. He was not only the King of Macedon, but also the Pharaoh of Egypt, the King of Persia, and the King of Asia. He is regarded as one of the most influential people in history.

Wikipedia Trail: From Cinderella to Clades

For my first wikipedia I started with Cinderella. I chose this because for my reading this week I read the Brother's Grimm story Aschenputtel, which the Disney Movie is based off of. I wanted to learn more about the different variations on the story of Cinderella.

One take on Cinderella

My next article was about the Aarne–Thompson classification systems. This is a system that classifies different folktales. It gives each folktale a number to signify the central motif found within the story. I saw that the story of Cinderella was given the classification 510A, and I wanted to exactly what they meant so I clicked through to the article.

After that article I clicked over to an article about Phylogenetics. This deals with studying the evolutionary history and relationships of an organism. This method was used to study the folktales and group them together. I didn't know much about this concept, but I thought it was interesting that they used a biology concept to help sort through stories.

The last article I looked at dealt with clades. This is essentially a family tree, where you group together organisms that descended from the same ancestors. This is used in phylogenetics to help visually sort the organisms that they are studying. I didn't know what a clade was beforehand so I was interested to see how it related to this biology concept.