Are birds dinosaurs? Part 1/9: What are dinosaurs?
Transcript with sources: https://internet-evoluzzer.de/dino-bi...
chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:26 Reptiles?
4:50 Archosaurs
7:45 Avemetatarsalia and Ornithodira
11:05 Dinosaurs
Hardly any other group of extinct animals fascinates young and old more than the dinosaurs. The Mesozoic era is often referred to as the "age of the dinosaurs" because these amazing animals evolved in the late Triassic and dominated the landscape for over 140 million years during the rest of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. But even today, our planet is home to a myriad of different dinosaur species. But we're not talking about turtles, lizards, snakes or crocodiles - we're talking about birds. From the smallest hummingbird to the ostrich, all of the 11,000 or so birds described as living today are real dinosaurs (Chiappe 2009, Currie 2023). But why are birds real dinosaurs, but lizards and crocodiles are not?
In the following articles, we want to explain why birds are dinosaurs and want to explore this on the basis of the fossil record, cladistics and the anatomy of these animal groups. But before we do this, we must first classify what a dinosaur is, because this is the first step in recognizing why birds are dinosaurs, but monitor lizards, crocodiles, snakes and turtles are not.