When I was a kid, I learned about Dinosaur being “giant lizard”, and it’s been may-be 10 years, that I hear “Birds are dinosaurs”.
I am curious on how the concept evolve, both among paleontologists, and among the general public.
Everyone wants a cool origin story I guess.
Also we moved from “that looks similar-ish” to analysis of fossiles and their evolution + genetic research.
But I, and thats a fact, know very little about that, and come from times when dinosaurs did not wear any fancy feathers.
All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.
By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.
Wow, I had no idea.
gasp and they were squamates
This is fairly recent bird lore. Like late 80s to 90s. It takes a while for schools to catch up so I missed it as well.
Science!
Science got rid of Pluto as a planet tho. 😭
Pluto wasn’t demoted. It didn’t get a pay cut or see a loss of benefits.
Our vocabulary has gotten richer and more specific as we’ve explored Pluto and things like it. As we launch missions like New Horizons out there, we’re going to need new terms to talk about the things we find. We sent a whole probe to Pluto; Uranus and Neptune had to share.
I don’t think that is quite accurate.
We discovered many more Pluto-or-larger sized things that were closer to the sun than Pluto. It became increasingly obvious that there was nothing special about Pluto and we either needed to add hundreds of planets or “demote” Pluto.
I don’t believe that is accurate. Beside moons (which don’t orbit the sun), Pluto is the largest and closest dwarf planet.
Not the closest. Ceres is a dwarf planet inside the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Holy shit science vanished a whole dwarf planet that’s insane 😱
Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.
I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.
And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.
My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like
We had known that birds are descended from dinosaurs well before the general public and the majority of paleontologists starting saying “birds are dinosaurs”. So simply saying that “we discovered that birds are descended from dinosaurs” is not sufficient to answering your question.
Traditional taxonomy allows for paraphyletic groups, meaning that not all of the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of the group are required to be in that group. So in this case, even though it was known that birds are descended from dinosaurs, they continued to be considered two separate groups, with dinosaurs being a paraphyletic group. Birds were known first, dinosaurs were later discovered and were considered a distinct group, then the link between the the two groups was discovered, but how they were grouped did not immediately change. That birds were not considered to be dinosaurs was a rather arbitrary effect based on how they were discovered and not on any scientific basis.
One book on dinosaurs from 1997 wrote:
So why the change? There is a trend in science to prefer cladistic classification, which requires every group to be a clade, meaning that all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of a group are in the group. This effectively means that paraphyletic grouping is being abandoned. So with cladistic taxonomy birds are dinosaurs.
There are other traditionally paraphyletic groups that are still in the process of changing. For example traditionally monkeys were a paraphyletic group, but any clade that includes all monkeys necessarily includes the apes, so in cladistics apes are monkeys. Though, you will still hear many people say ‘apes are not monkeys’. Fish was also a paraphyletic group, which included all vertebrates except tetrapods, but of course in cladistics, tetrapods are fish.
tetrapods are fish
I like this particularly because it allows you to tell people that whales are fish, which is generally going to get a much stronger response than if you said “people are fish”. Because in the latter, they know you’re up to something weird, but in the former they’re not sure if you might just be wrong.
The idea is quite old:
Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He compared the skeletal structure of Compsognathus, a small theropod dinosaur, and the “first bird” Archaeopteryx lithographica (both of which were found in the Upper Jurassic Bavarian limestone of Solnhofen). He showed that, apart from its hands and feathers, Archaeopteryx was quite similar to Compsognathus.
But known fossil evidence is quite young:
One of the earliest discoveries of possible feather impressions by non-avian dinosaurs is a trace fossil (Fulicopus lyellii) of the 195–199 million year old Portland Formation in the northeastern United States. Gierlinski (1996, 1997, 1998) and Kundrát (2004) have interpreted traces between two footprints in this fossil as feather impressions from the belly of a squatting dilophosaurid.
It’s too bad T.H. Huxley was such a racist POS. He was a great paleontologist and I like his style of agnosticism.
I just read his Wikipedia page. Under the conditions of his time, how was he a racist? The article says he opposed slavery, opposed “scientific racists” of the time who argued polygenism and that some races were “transitional” between animal and man, and he asserted that science could never excuse the atrocities of slave owners.
He did have incomplete theories about a racial hierarchy of intelligence, which was a common idea at the time. The article doesn’t suggest that he was a primary champion of that theory, or that it heavily featured in most of his work.
In my opinion, he seems like a man who was doing what he could to expand his understanding of his observations, even if he was limited and misled by the prevailing methods and attitudes of his lifetime. Perhaps he should be judged against his peers rather than modern sensitivities, particularly without any evidence of malice in his work.
You’re right, and he softened his stance with age (as well as his stance on sexism). To add to it on a personal level, I also enjoy the works of H.P. Lovecraft and he was wildly racist even compared to his peers.
It’s less about judging him by today’s standards than it is about lamenting that I’ll never be able to think of his work without remembering his racist views. I also can’t watch Call Girl of Cthulhu without remembering Lovecraft’s cat’s name. I can separate the art and science from the artist and scientist, especially if they’re dead so that they can’t benefit from it, but because of my own past (I was raised with a lot of passive racism by well meaning people) I can’t forget what they said.
As I understand it, it’s due to advances in the technology that supports biology and paleontology. When all scientists had to go on were fossils, the bone structure of dinosaurs more closely resembled giant lizards, so thats the conclusion they came to. But recent techniques, including genetic analysis on currently existing species, clearly shows the link between birds and dinosaurs. (And, in fact, alligators are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards.)
I found this article which seems to explain it well:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dinosaurs-shrank-and-became-birds/
alligators are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards.
Well that’s a cool TIL
Thank you for actually providing an explanation beyond stating the word “science”
It’s really weird to think I put out feed to attract the colorful cousins of alligators to my back yard.
Or heres a good youtube channel/ vid on it that goes into detial
Or if your interested in paleontology discoverys/theorys they also do monthy reviews about new papers that have came out! And i feel like raptor chatter explains it simple enough to me to understand even with no background in the field 😅
I remember in my childhood in the 90s reading it as a possibility. So it was already on people’s radar. And as far as I know in the book Jurassic Park they do hqve feathers. Haven’t watched the newer movies, but I heard that in Jurassic World it was explained by the frog DNA that they didn’t have feathers.
It’s both!
Triassic: Giant Lizards --> Cretaceous: Giant Birds
All birds are reptiles
Haha, no. Birds aren’t even real.
A large part of the confusion is that dinosaurs did not emerge from birds in the same way that humans did not evolve from Chimpanzees (nor monkeys) - but rather, both groups in those pairs evolved from a common ancestor (but different ones:-).
Birds have feathers and for the most part fly, while alligators not so much. In attempting to simplify, e.g. Avians to “birds”, it causes confusion. Alligators also are not warm-blooded as birds are, not do they have beaks, all hallmarks of modern birds, but they do have four legs, long body with a tail, moveable eyelids - and don’t they have external ear openings as well? - all hallmarks of modern lizards.
Scientists use precision language like “non-Avian theropod”, but those don’t map perfectly to common words like “birds”, which everyone knows are just government drones anyway:-P.
Government drones aren’t real!
Science
I saw some documentary that suggested that they used to chip straight through fossilized feathers and skin to get to the bones because they didn’t realise what they were.
Do you remember the name? I haven’t watched a dinosaur documentary in many years.
Sorry, I don’t.
I’m pretty sure Jurassic Park (the movie) coming out was when it became common knowledge to the general public. A few hardcore dinosaur nerds (and readers of the Jurassic Park novel) were generally aware beforehand, but it was the movie that pushed it into common knowledge. (Source: I was 14 when Jurassic Park (the movie) came out)
I saw an interesting thing where they wanted that raptor chase scene, but raptors are only knee height, which isn’t very intimidating. Then, while filming, someone discovered a raptor skeleton that was human sized, so they took it. It apparently didn’t look anything like the ones in the movie, but they really wanted it and had an excuse to use it.
Jurassic Park in fucking 1993 has a scene where Alan Grant messes with an annoying kid, and he clearly tells the audience that they are similar to God damn birds, you silly goose. You are that kid in the film in real life.
Birds are reptiles.
