this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Fun fact: I heard that the meteor was not actually what killed them off, but rather even before that, changes in the atmosphere had already begun to make ginormous lizards a less viable solution.
Mammals were just so adaptable, that we adapted to the post-meteor changes, even as we had already been adapting to the before-meteor ones.
I am guessing that most, if not all, mass extinctions were a multi-cause issue.
Even so, one line of thinking along those lines is that the meteor did not in fact kill off the dinosaurs. It did manage to polish them off, but they were decreasing in prominence as mammals increased already. I doubt anyone could prove one way or another, but it's a fascinating thought to ponder b/c if true, that would mean that the meteor was not the primary cause of their extinction:-). Maybe it was their lack of adaptability? As in, they were fossils even when they were alive:-P.
Birds are, essentially, dinosaurs. Dinosaurs never died out, they just got smaller.
I know what you mean but... actually it's more like crocs, alligators, and gila monsters are the "dinosaurs" - especially since that word essentially means "large lizard":-P. Birds are also their descendents its true but they kinda also have their own thing going on, having abandoned their origins in favor of that.
You're not wrong though:-).
Paleontologists would disagree and it's their field of expertise.
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/fighting-dinos/birds-living-dinosaurs
They are not "living large reptiles" though:-P.
Likely they are referring to birds being in a monophyletic clade alongside dinos, but by that logic, humans are monkeys.
I mean, we are warmblooded, give live birth, have opposable thumbs, etc., so we aren't "not apes"... but also we are so much more, so very different than how we started.
Also, computers are rocks.:-D
I think you're confusing a word's origin with what scientists understand now. Please explain the functional difference between a modern bird and a prehistoric theropod.
Since you asked for *functional difference", the first one that comes to mind is that birds can fly? Another is that while all birds descended from dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs descended from birds - in fact none did afaik.
Another example like this is that all large mammals descended originally from single-celled organisms, but not all single-celled organisms descended from multicellular ones, in fact most (probably literally all?) did not.
Likewise, just as all single-celled + multicellular eukaryotes belong to a single monophyletic clade, but there are ENORMOUS differences between them (fungi vs. plants vs. humans), so too do dinosaurs and avians belong to the same monophyletic clade, for all that that means.
Which MEANS then that the word "dinosaur" needed to be redefined, after that discovery about birds being part of the same group. So they did that:
And the paragraph after that also talks about birds, citing why paleontologists use the term "non-avian dinosaur" to carefully distinguish the true reptiles from the birds that came out from their midst.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx
Which is why I said all birds are dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs are birds. What does that have to do with anything?
Nothing to do with theropods vs. birds.
Your link says that is a "more handy general definition," not a scientific one. Furthermore, the very next paragraph of your link says-
Did you even read it? It literally contradicts your claim. It can't contradict your claim any more clearly. And yet you use it to make your point that birds are not dinosaurs?
Ah, so birds are theropods.
So theropods both are and are not dinosaurs?
Yet again- paleontologists disagree with you. Do you have a degree in their field?
... right, "Archaeopteryx" can fly, but not all "dinosaurs" can fly. That distinction is crucial.
In an entirely different manner, "dinosaur" != "theropod" bc the former is a common word, an unscientific one, whereas the latter is a more precise one. If you had originally asked me are birds theropods, I would have been forced to say yes (entirely unbegrudgingly though, I'm just emphasizing how I would have no choice), but that's not what you asked: you talked about DINOSAURS vs. birds, which is an entirely different thing, being in the realm of common use of those words.
Anyway, I agree that it is good to learn more about things, and as we do, we become better ourselves.:-)
No one said all dinosaurs can fly or that all dinosaurs are birds.
I said birds are dinosaurs.
Paleontologists say birds are dinosaurs.
The link you provided me said birds are dinosaurs.
Only you disagree.
"Common use" of the words does not matter. Birds are dinosaurs in every biological way.
I mean we pretty much are. Aside from going hairless and standing upright how much different are we really?
Computers are further removed from rocks than a dinosaur is from a mamal.
Hehe computers are not animals or vegetables so...
It's metal + plastic.
Just like dinos and birbs have feathers.
Unless we say that the origin of things is not necessarily the sum total explanation of what they are.
Are you having some kind of aneurysm? We aren't talking about raw materials, we are talking about evolution and how similar things are. Humans are functionally still animals. Computers are not functionally just rocks.
Crocs are about as far away from dinosaurs as an archosaur can get. They split off from them very early on. Note where birds fall on this chart on the other hand.