this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Dinosaurs were not reptiles. Reptiles already existed when dinosaurs evolved and there are completely different evolutionary lineage.
I'm just copy & pasting Wikipedia;
But reptiles is more a culturally based category than a strictly defined biological class, so you might prefer a definition that excludes dinosaurs, and that's fine. I'll admit, it seems odd to class birds as reptiles, and strictly speaking if you exclude birds you should exclude dinos too.
Here's the thing. You said "dinosaurs are reptiles."
Are they in the same class? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies dinosaurs, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls dinosaurs reptiles. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "reptile class" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Reptilia, which includes things from snakes to turtles to lizards.
So your reasoning for calling a dinosaur a reptile is because random people "call the scaly ones reptiles?" Let's get fish and pangolins in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A dinosaur is a dinosaur and a member of the reptilia class. But that's not what you said. You said a dinosaur is a reptile, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the reptilia class reptiles, which means you'd call microraptors, jackdaws, and other birds reptiles, too. Which you said you don't.
It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
Seeing this copypasta breathes life into my old bones
U got me there, unidan
What I also find interesting is that the nearest extant animals to birds are crocodilians. Both belong to the archosaur clade, even if there's around a 240 million years gap between them.
As you say, birds can be classified as belonging to reptiles under the cladistic route, but they're quite radically different to the reptiles that live today, so are seen as not really reptilian. It's not surprising, seeing that the link between crocodiles, true reptiles in all senses, and birds were the dinosaurs, who disappeared 65 million years ago. A whole lot of evolutionary change in that time.
Depends on how pedantic you want to be regarding the term "dinosaur" Dimetrodon and plesiosaurs for instance are reptiles but if you buy a pack of plastic dinosaurs for your kid the odds are damn near 100 percent those are gunna be in there. Not applicable to the T-Rex I know but it's like the whole debacle of "what counts as a berry" thing. Like sure a blackberry is an aggregate drupe but it is culturally a valid answer to "what's your favorite berry?"
That is not even a little true. If it was your phylogeny would mean crocodillians aren't reptiles.
It isn't my philosophy, it's sciences. What do you want about?
It is your phylogeny (not philosophy), you're proposing a different phylogeny than science does.
Archosaurs, such as crocodillians, diverged from a common ancestor BEFORE birds/dinosaurs did, from other reptiles.
In order for what you're saying to be true, we'd have to exclude crocodillians from being reptiles. No standard definition would not include crocodillians as reptiles. In modern taxonomy, we use what are called monophyletic groups to determine relatedness. Because of this, birds and all dinosaurs fall under the clade archosauria, and are therefore reptiles.
In essence, what you're proposing would be like saying "Your cousin is a reptile, but not your brother"
Yeah! Keep up the good fight and fuck paraphyletic groups.