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.
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/
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 😅
It’s both!
Triassic: Giant Lizards --> Cretaceous: Giant Birds
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.
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.
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 having 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.
