Knowledge is knowing that a bird is a dinosaur. Wisdom is not charging people extra to see your reconstituted Jurassic Park style dinosaur zoo when all you’ve got is a barn full of chickens.
To really understand the meaning of this, please read my brand new essay at 10,000 birds, here:
If Birds are Dinosaurs than I’m a Monkey’s Uncle
… which is part of the Come At Me series of fantastic posts on that site.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle
or Paperback
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Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Couple of links which may interest readers.
One I just seen now about tool making birds.
Birdbrainy: New Caledonian crows make tools using mental images
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/29/birdbrainy-new-caledonian-crows-make-tools-using-mental-images?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
And the absolutely glorious onezoom explorer.
http://www.onezoom.org/life/@cellular_organisms=93302#x-32,y396,w0.7098
I’ve had a long-time interest in paleontology and done a fair amount of reading about the dinosaur-bird relationship reappraisal since the late John Ostrom’s paper on the “raptor” dinosaur Deinonychus (the model for the Velociraptors in the Jurassic Park movies; it had a better shaped head than the actual Velociraptors, or something). I see no problem with considering birds as the last surviving dinosaur lineage — one that includes undoubted dinosaurs at its beginnings.
Bats are acknowledged as just a biological order of flying mammals. If they end up the last group of living mammals after a mass extinction, by normal paleontological/biological classification methods, bats would still be considered to be a mammal subgroup. What then is the problem with acknowledging that birds are just the last of the theropod dinosaurs?
Birds and theropod dinosaurs have much in common anatomically (there are dozens of shared derived features of maniraptoran dinosaurs and birds), and even behaviorally (brooding on nests, roosting posture). Even creationists’ computer programs with built-in special creation assumptions still can’t group birds without including some dinosaurs or group dinosaurs without including some birds.
Now considering all tetrapods as just subgroups of sarcoptyrigians (lobe-finned “fish”) might be going a bit too far.