Re: KT boundry event


John Harshman wrote:


Not exactly. They're birds.

And they're dinosaurs too. This is really a very simple concept. What if
Pip had told you that whales are mammals? Would you have replied "Not
exactly. They're whales."? It's only tradition and the accidents of
extinction that led early taxonomists to makes Aves a class and
dinosaurs a part of a different class, Reptilia. Fortunately, those bad
old days of confusion are gone, and modern taxonomists show Aves as a
group within Dinosauria.

Necessarily, if our classifications are to mirror phylogeny, we must
have groups within groups. Birds are theropods, and dinosaurs, and
archosaurs, and amniotes, and tetrapods, and sarcopterygians, etc. One
does not preclude the others.

Dinosaurs as a group are extinct. Birds are different from dinosaurs as
a group. 'Dinosaurs' is a smaller group that does not include modern
birds per se, just as 'whales' does not include 'bovines'. Manatees are
not whales, even though manatees and whales may have a common ancestor.

We use different terms because the features of birds are different from
dinos.

.

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