hey, @bunjywunjy – this might be your jam (and any other dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s a heck of a read)
man that’s not just a heck of a read it’s fuckin GROUNDBREAKING is what it is!
this dude actually found a large fossil deposit that was created not just close to, but actually DURING THE K-PG EXTINCTION EVENT.
IT’S LITERALLY A WINDOW BACK IN TIME TO THE CHICXULUB IMPACT, AND TURNS OUT IT WAS WORSETHANANYTHINGWE COULDPOSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED
it’s a geologic snapshot of the apocalypse.
reading the full article is certainly a trip, and to summarize for those who are intimidated by longer reads:
– chicxulub is the given name for the meteor that struck/initiated the event
– the paleontologist within is described as making groundbreaking discoveries of multiple species every day, but many of his peers discount him because they’re grouchy old dudes he accidentally had a fragment of a turtle bone involved in a larger reconstruction of a fossil this one time and they won’t let him live it down.
– the extinction event was so fast and so destructive, this guy describes this particular dig-site as being so densely layered with dead and dying creatures, there is a lot of organic tissues that have been preserved, and he is able to even discern that many of the marine and freshwater fish may have still been alive as they were buried due to molten glass being found in their gills, implying they were still attempting to breathe.
– they looked into exactly when and how this could have happened, having freshwater and marine animals stacked on top of mammals and larger dinosaurs (including an amazing deinonychus forearm discovery he was able to match to feather fossils he was finding atop the pile), and rather it being the initial tsunami, they are fairly sure that it was caused by a seiche of catastrophic proportions, which would have been set off within the first hour of the event. denser and larger creatures sunk to the bottom, leaving lighter debris like leaves, small fish, feathers, and molten glass on the surface.
Ankylosaurs were some of the most well-protected vertebrates to ever live, with some going so far as having armored eyelids. Their history shows a fierce arms race between powerful predators and prey.
*The
animals represented here are not to scale and don’t represent a direct
line of descent, but rather plausible models for how this amazing
transition happened.*
well for non avian dinosaurs, theres no real reversion (for lack of better word) like there is for mammals with whales. spinosaurus spent some time in the water, as did baryonyx (probably) but for all dinosaurs theres always:
swan
the reason theres so few/no (semi)aquatic dinosaurs is because theyre both oviparous (lay eggs) and endothermic (warm blooded)
Waterfowl are definitely a great example, but the penguins have a long and distinguished history. They’ve been adapting towards torpedo-y goodness since the late Cretaceous / early Paleogene.
And going back to non-avian dinosaurs there’s also the duck-like Halszkaraptor!
This little swimming raptor was only discovered very recently (named in late 2017), so it’s entirely possible there were a bunch more small semi-aquatic dinosaurs we just haven’t found fossils of yet.
they aren’t actually classified differently! I’m simplifying this answer a bit because Taxonomy is the most goddam impenetrable branch of all the sciences and I hate it, but it works like this.
Terror Birds were a Clade of extinct birds called Phorusrhacids, grouped under Aves, which is in turn merely a branch of Superorder Dinosauria,which itself is in the Class Reptilia. It’s turtles all the way down, folks!
(there’s a few other steps on the way, but again I am simplifying for the sake of my sanity.)
thus, we can say that a Terror Bird IS a Bird IS a Dinosaur IS a Reptile, in the same way that a Human IS an Ape IS a Primate IS a Mammal! ISN’T CLASSIFICATION FUN, KIDS.
You’re trying to be funny/clever but in context, evolution jokes don’t work when your stance is that birds aren’t related to/evolved from dinosaurs, but rather are literally the same exact thing as dinosaurs
But the thing is, they are. They’re in the clade dinosauria. It’s less akin to the comparison you made of saying dogs are not the same things as wolves, and more like saying dogs and cats are different and therefore can’t both be mammals, or lizards and turtles are different so no way they are both reptiles.
You can’t just decide birds are not dinosaurs based on arbitrary stuff like wether you think they’re as cool as a t-rex or if they look exactly like what you think of when you hear the word ‘dinosaur’.
I think a lot of your arguments come from not understanding how taxonomy works.
ifesbob 