Scientists found a fossilized dinosaur sitting on eggs containing fossilized embryos

For real. :laughing:

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like the fuzzy synapsids of the Permian and whether they were technically mammals or not

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I mean ideally you also build the zoo in such a way that the animals don’t all escape in the event of a power failure. It’s not like San Diego is overrun with elephants and lions and gorillas every time Southern California experiences a blackout.

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Obligs:

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That one kind of bugs me though. Partly because the Triceratops is oddly missing, partly because he picks only examples where there is at least one way the sparrow stands out dramatically, size, which genuinely influences a lot about an animal. But mostly because by the standards by which people say birds are dinosaurs, it is literally synonymous with saying that birds are descended from dinosaurs. What kind of a correction is “not this, but tautological equivalent of this”?

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Was that a correction? It looked like an elaboration to me, or an illustration of a parallel point.

“birds are dinosaurs” is a little like saying “people are lemurs”

It’s a lot more like saying “apes are mammals”.

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also fish

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It’s even more like saying “people are apes” or “apes are monkeys”. Lemurs are actually off to one side of primate evolution, but there’s absolutely no doubt on the sequence here…people evolved from within the group of things we call apes, which evolved from within the group of things we call monkeys.

The rest is a semantic question of what you do with that. There is a traditional definition of monkeys that leaves out apes, apes that leaves out people, and dinosaurs that leaves out birds. Using the standards of cladistics, though, evolving from a group is the same thing as being part of it…so that is the same as saying people are apes, apes are monkeys, and birds are dinosaurs by definition.

Is that worth using? Most biologists at least now use the words “apes” and “dinosaurs” according to that rule, so they include people and birds respectively. On the other hand I think “monkeys” usually gets left aside as an informal term, in part because we already have the name “simian” for the monkeys and apes together.

Saying birds aren’t descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs, would be wrong by the traditional definition but is saying the same thing twice by the new one. It makes it sound like they are different statements but it’s only true if they aren’t.

Mammal at least has something in it to suggest where to draw the line, since it comes from mamma meaning breast. Not that monotremes actually have nipples, but they do still nurse their young. And of course that doesn’t fossilize very well…but sometimes milk teeth do, and I think it is generally believed the one evolved along with the other.

Unfortunately someone decided Mammalia should refer to a crown group, that is only things from after the monotremes separated from the marsupials and placentals, but the close relatives that share those features are still called Mammaliaformes. :slight_smile:

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If we can just send David Attenborough ¼ billion years into the past to film the Planet of the Platypuses

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No, it’s more like saying people are primates.

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it’s all a matter of whether our ancestors who looked like lemurs count as lemurs or not

Again, no. Lemurs are a sister taxon, not necessarily basal primates. Most likely the “basal primate” was something like a small tarsier- or tree shrew-looking critter, which gave rise to all the variety in the primate family. To get back on topic, just as humans are nestled firmly in the primate taxon, so are birds nestled firmly in the dinosaur taxon. All birds are dinosaurs, all humans are primates.

Genome sequence of the basal haplorrhine primate Tarsius syrichta reveals unusual insertions | Nature Communications

3. Primate Evolution – The History of Our Tribe: Hominini (geneseo.edu)

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I should’ve said “tree shrews” at the beginning, that would have been funnier

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image

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