Talk:Dinosaur

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If dinosaurs are reptiles

And birds are dinosaurs, then wouldn't that mean birds must be reptiles? 209.86.226.25 (talk) 01:31, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Correct, in the cladistic system (but not the Linnaean system used in the info boxes), birds are reptiles. MMartyniuk (talk) 01:41, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

dinosaurs are not extinct, they have been spotted in numerous backyards, jungles and forestrial and industrial parks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.162.35.112 (talk) 12:44, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Birds are dinosaurs, but the African cryptids are likely to be a myth. Crimsonraptor (talk) 18:50, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Birds are not reptiles. When you say "are" you imply their current status. Birds, as the contemporary theory goes, descended from reptillian ancestors. Just as man descended from the earliest forms of mammalian life. That does not mean our current status is small mammalian rodents. Birds have reptillian ancestry, they are not currently reptiles. 204.65.34.169 (talk) 14:08, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

You are wrong, birds are reptiles. Abyssal (talk) 16:20, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

From Biology, 8th Edition by Campbell and Reece (and many other junior authors): "The reptile clade includes tuataras, lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodilians and birds, along with a number of extinct groups, such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs." This is the text used in the BIO 111 course I teach. It is representative of many new texts in that birds are no longer afforded separate treatment as they were under non-cladistic classifications. --Khajidha (talk) 00:38, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

I totally agree that the two are one, it's just that it's a lot easier to treat them seperately!...But I try to include them. The classification system's so messed up that I try to make it simpler...Crimsonraptor | (Contact me) Dumpster dive if you must 00:42, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

'Birds' and 'reptiles' are just terms we have invented.Western science has long had a mania for attaching labels to living things and putting them in their proper boxes. The truth is, life varies along a broad and colourful spectrum. When can we say a reptile becomes a bird, or vice versa, unless we create artificial criteria for separating them? Science at last acknowledges this. It may be that the terms Reptilia, Aves, Mammalia, etc, will become popular terms and have no scientific value whatsoever. A bit of a nominalist perspective here.Gazzster (talk) 10:56, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Yeah. We've completely messed up the measuring system by introducing our own "better" thing (I'm trying hard to convert back to metric). Now the classification system has fallen too. Might need a redesign someday...Crimsonraptor | (Contact me) Dumpster dive if you must 13:26, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Just because a type of animal evolved from another doesn't mean that it is. Amphibians evolved from fish but are not fish. If birds are considered reptiles then so should mammals. Mammals evolved from reptiles as well. I think birds are to diffirent from modern day reptiles. When I check the bird page they are not listed as reptiles or archosauria but as a seperate class (aves). There is still a debate whether birds evolved from Dinosaurs or an ealier reptile species but if they evolved from a species of dinosaurs that doesn't mean that they are Dinosaurs or Reptiles. An Eagle is something totally diffirent then a Triceratops, Apatosaurus or a snake. I think birds could be considered their own order. There were some bird-like Dinosaurs just as there were mammal-like reptiles. In both cases there will be animals that are on the edge of both classes which will be difficult to be put in either class. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.105.181.214 (talk) 18:50, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Sigh! Why is it that people always re-define terms any way they like, then blabber exhaustively about them, instead of just accepting that there are already valid scientific definitions in existence? And why is it that these people are those who can't spell? rediculous, diffirent, seperate.......HMallison (talk) 04:05, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Sigh! Why do phylogentic nomenclaturists allways assume that phylogeny is the only criterum for classification? And why do they re-define terms any way they like instead of inventing new ones to cover what they mean? Birds are not reptiles in the common understanding of the words. Forcing phyologentic taxonomy without explaing what is going on is not doing anyone a favour. Petter Bøckman (talk) 05:36, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Sigh! I do biomechanics, and dislike taxonomy and cladistics. The point is, however, that wikipedia as an encyclopedic work should not use arbitrary terms (e.g., "reptile" in the sense of "snakes+turtles+crocodiles", at least in a palaeontological context, but it is not helpful, but rather confusing to the reader, especially if the use varies (due to necessity) across several articles. If we use proper clades, readers will be able to understand even complex concepts and evolutionary lines, if we use "everyday terms", things will be as confusing as school biology class content shows itself to be each and every time someone with an interest in the subject encounters fossils. I have found that people can understand nested hierarchies easily, and get a much better grasp of evolutionary processes if you use them.

Just because "commonly", people in Europe assign crocodiles to reptiles, but not birds, doesn't mean that this is helpful, sensible, or the case in other cultures - would you like to vary based on local conventions? And how to treat terms that have, like the term "reptile" varied in their meaning historically? Maybe we should go back to the scala naturae?

btw, yo risk sounding very much like a BANDit apologist, with your continued fight against correctness and clarity. HMallison (talk) 07:56, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Hm, bandit apologist, haven't heard that one before (had to look it up). I am not entirely sure we want to go down that road.

I'm a zoologist and work as a public educator in a natural history museum (I'm typically the guy to tour school classes). To me taxonomy is an essential tool to keep track of the various critters of this planet, I'm supposed to be able to say something intelligent about eartworms, insects, fish and (of course) dinosaurs. You may say I'm a typical end user in that I need taxonomy as a filing system. I don't use cladistics myself (I'm more of an ecologist), but I would be a fool if I did not recognise it's value. I have no problem with fylogentically defined taxons (eg Tetanura, Maniraptora, Dinosauriformes) they are needed to explore the nooks and crannies of phylogeny, but I do have a problem with changing content of a well established unit. As an end user, I depend on taxonomic stability. New units are perfectly fine by me, I think the taxon you are looking for is Sauropsida, not Reptilia. The two are not interchangeable units, and we should take care to say when we mean one or the other. Dinosaurs of course are both.

As for local convention, I hope you are aware that dinosaur palaeontology is kind of unique in it's wholesale embracement of phylogenetic nomenclature. Petter Bøckman (talk) 11:30, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Hm, I do see the use of established names has it's use - don't get me wrong! The issue about dinosaurs is that keeping up the old-fashioned use of the term, in my experience (and I have quite some, although likely not as much as you) CONFUSES both laypeople and journalists MORE than if I take the extra two minutes to explain what MRCA (LCA in normal parlance) is, give one example (typically: "imagine we want to study hereditary diseases. We have a family from Dresden names 'Schmitz', in which the disease is prevalent. Now we add Mr. Mugundu from Zaire - is that going to be helpful? No, we want to study a related group"), and then use "Dinosaur" to include birds as well. Obviously, I'll slip back into the old use when the context is clear, but I'll often use "non-avian" or "non-bird" or "mesozoic". And people remember - some come back over a year later and still remember!

Additionally, while many zoologists and botanists do not, the best zoologists I know embrace phylogenetic taxa wholeheartedly, because they force people to think in proper relationship terms, pushing old bias aside.

In sum, I think we are on a very good way with how the article (more: the version on dinoguy2's userpage) is developing. I am a bit radical one way, you are the brake that keeps me in check. This will end up well :) HMallison (talk) 22:59, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Under that logic Humans would be Fish, and we'd all be bacteria (or whatever the equivilent term is) --Kurtle (talk) 15:42, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

This is wrong on multiple levels. First, we are not fish because we do not share enough genetic and anatomical similarities to fit under the criteria of "fish". Secondly, we did not evolve from bacteria. We evolved from a eukaryotic single cell organism, and we are called eukaryotes because we have the necessary requirements to fit this clade we made. The reason why birds are currently melded with reptiles is because there are not nearly enough genetic and anatomical differences between them and theropods to warrant separation, so birds are considered theropods. And since theropods are dinosaurs, then birds are dinosaurs. And since dinosaurs are archosaurs, birds are archosaurs. And finally, since archosaurs are reptiles, birds are reptiles. There, I gave you the overly simplified thought process of this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.206.235.155 (talk) 01:48, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Don't go to List of misconceptions. There's an ongoing war about the fact that only non-Avian dinosaurs went extinct at the K-T boundary, which is my preferred edit. Some non-scientific types that say that's silly. War ensues. OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 04:07, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

As far as I am concerned, we are fish. Lobe-finned fish specifically. See Sarcopterygii. As for bacteria, the tree structure is a bit more muddled that deep in our ancestry. We are really both bacteria and archaea. de Bivort 05:11, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

According to Cavalier-Smith, we are indeed bacteria in this sense, but not archaea, although I wouldn't be surprised if the eucaryotes themselves eventually turned out to form just a low branch derived from within the Archaea, and indeed there are indications that this could the case, see Archaea#Relation to eucaryotes.

Anyway, you can't have it both ways. Either you don't give a damn about both cladistics and morphology – then you may keep using, without qualification and without batting a lash, the popular classification schemes which treat whales and dolphins as "fish", classify all sorts of superficially similar land (and marine?) invertebrates – possibly including even some vertebrates, such as snakes (or even eels?) – as "worms", all sorts of insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and bacteria as well as viruses as "bugs" and either plus a couple of other broad groups as "critters" (basically pests, nuisances and repulsive little creatures you consider entirely unfit for eating), primates except humans as "monkeys" and possibly even bats as "birds", in veritable redneck fashion. But if you want to reserve your right to be a smart-aleck and point out that whales are not really fish, which refers mainly to ancestry and morphological arguments, you should be correct in other areas too lest you come across as an inconsistent, arbitrary jerk; which means that humans are, in the same sense, probably bacteria, quite possibly also archaea, lobe-finned fish, reptiles, monkeys, and of course, apes, unintuitive as it may seem. That's the fascinating and worthwhile thing about science: It challenges our most dearly held preconceptions and forces us to reconsider our view of the world. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:32, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Not quite Florian. Old Linnaeus, knowing nothing about cladistics put whales in Mammalia. You can indeed have it both ways, it's just a matter of language. Saying we are fish, or saying we have evolved from fish is just two ways of expressing exactly the same phylogeny, only the latter allows you to also say your are not a fish. Don't go and make the mistake and mix up cladistics with phylogenetic nomenclature, they are not the same. Petter Bøckman (talk) 21:15, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Why in the world would you want to say you are not a fish? :D MMartyniuk (talk) 21:24, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Because I'm a bit short on gills and fins. Not too fond of swimming either ;-) Petter Bøckman (talk) 21:54, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Please give back your lung, liver, intestines, cervicalisation, etc., too ;) HMallison (talk) 23:56, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Damit, I knew this cranium thing was too good to last. Can I at least keep the liver, if I promise to phagocytize in it? Petter Bøckman (talk) 07:15, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure?

In response to "What?", I have a question: Are you sure that dinosaurs are reptiles? This review of Walking with Dinosaurs says otherwise. I doubt he's correct, I just want to confirm it. 70.80.215.121 (talk) 12:04, 10 July 2011 (UTC)Adam70.80.215.121 (talk) 12:04, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

That person has no idea what they're talking about. MMartyniuk (talk) 12:35, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

There is one relevant question in that review: How "hot-blooded" were the various critters really? He seem to object to the use of "reptile" as the dinosaurs (and a synapsid) weren't "cold-blooded enough" to be reptiles. While the position is kind of moronic, it begs the interesting question is how "warm-blooded" the creatures in Walking With Dinosaurs really were. At what state of temperature control do we semantically draw the line between cold-blooded (in it's various forms) and homeothermy/endothermy? If we assume some form of temperature control was the original state of affairs in Archosauria and at least in the more advanced Pelycosauria, how did that control "work". How was temperature regulated, and what were their optimal temperature? To what degree were they bradymetabolic, or were any of them obligate homeothermic? This article (Dinosaur) seem to rely on a somewhat simplistic dichotomous understanding of the cold/warm-bloodednes continuum, perhaps we should detail it a bit. Petter Bøckman (talk) 08:33, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Agreed 100%. 70.80.215.121 (talk) 15:31, 18 July 2011 (UTC)Adam70.80.215.121 (talk) 15:31, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Wow, that guy is a true moron, not one thing he said in that review was correct. Plus, much of it was criticizing pure speculation rather than facts that are evidently inaccurate. Walking with Dinosaurs was created specifically to portray dinosaurs as living, breathing creatures. They looked at the behaviours of animals living in the modern era and used them as a basis for their speculations of how dinosaurs may have lived. In other words, it wasn't meant to be an educational program regarding what we know from fossil evidence. As far as I'm concerned, it is pure entertainment that creates the illusion of being one of those African wildlife documentaries that have Attenborough's voice somehow escaping from between the acacia trees. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.36.148.242 (talk) 00:56, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Dino feathers in amber

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating article regarding dinosaur feathers trapped in amber and unearthed in the Alberta badlands. Certainly this is a relevant scientific discovery that may be notable enough to have at least a sentence or two in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.36.148.242 (talk) 00:44, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from 41.139.100.199, 21 September 2011

41.139.100.199 (talk) 17:29, 21 September 2011 (UTC) 66667junbnm,

Not a request--Jac16888 ^Talk 17:37, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Bird's are not Dinosaurs

Saying a bird is a dinosaur because they evolved from dinosaurs is like saying I'm really a modern mouse.