720
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

IIRC the current theory is that many (likely most) had feathers but few of the large ones had actual wings beyond just a row of longer feathers on the forearms. The bodily structures that allow flight are absent on the vast majority of dinosaurs so it's thought they mostly used their arm feathers as rudders for better control when running (which the ostrich and other large flightless birds still use). However, it is thought that some smaller species likely did have wings which they used to glide much like a flying squirrel. Eventually they evolved larger chest muscles and a keel for attaching said large muscles, and at that point you could reasonably just call them birds, which are to this day a subset of dinosaurs.

[-] DroneRights@lemm.ee 0 points 10 months ago

Birds are dinosaurs because taxonomy as a field is fundamentally based on garbage pseudoscience

[-] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

But even with more modern methods like cladistics and genetic analysis, birds are still found to be directly descended from contemporary dinosaurs.

[-] DroneRights@lemm.ee 0 points 10 months ago

And the taxonomic rule that any animal is also all of its ancestors is garbage science.

[-] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's not "science," that's just an arbitrary convention that can help simplify communication of complex toppics. The genetic data that the convention is derived from is the science, in the form of a lineage of genetic relations between organisms and nothing else, because biology has exactly zero built-in categories or labels, and those are all human-made.

[-] DroneRights@lemm.ee -1 points 10 months ago

Exactly, it's not science. And it's not helpful either. It doesn't simplify communication. The representative conventions of taxonomy are not derived from evidence, they're derived from the irrelevant feelings of taxonomists hundreds of years ago who didn't understand how the world works. It's pseudoscience. Pointless tradition masquerading as a legitimate exploratory endeavour.

this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
720 points (97.1% liked)

Science Memes

10340 readers
868 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.


Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS