Comments on: How To Reconcile the Insanity of Cladism with the Order and Beauty of the Linnaean System https://gregladen.com/blog/2018/06/27/how-to-reconcile-the-insanity-of-cladism-with-the-order-and-beauty-of-the-linnaean-system/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 09:03:22 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 By: Tyvor Winn https://gregladen.com/blog/2018/06/27/how-to-reconcile-the-insanity-of-cladism-with-the-order-and-beauty-of-the-linnaean-system/#comment-596889 Sat, 30 Jun 2018 09:03:22 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=29788#comment-596889 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.

]]> By: Li D https://gregladen.com/blog/2018/06/27/how-to-reconcile-the-insanity-of-cladism-with-the-order-and-beauty-of-the-linnaean-system/#comment-596699 Fri, 29 Jun 2018 01:42:30 +0000 https://gregladen.com/blog/?p=29788#comment-596699 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

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