In Soviet Russia, jerk-off taxes YOU!
Some economist needs to use this example in econ 101 teaching tax elasticities. It would totally make economics come alive for undergraduates.
What if you just choose one day to jerk off a bunch of times? Is that a discounted rate? It should be.
In related news, I was propositioned by a very hot person this weekend whom I had no reason to reject other than that I had something important to do the next morning, and this makes me sad because I am old. I was like, "What am I, 25? I have shit to do tomorrow, early in the morning!"
Artisanally hand-stretched tax elasticities, at that.
What if you just choose one day to jerk off a bunch of times? Is that a discounted rate? It should be.
This raises the issue of how the tax is levied. Is it per orgasm? (This seems to be the way it's discussed in the linked post.) Per some unit of time? Flat rate per day (which AWB seems to be envisioning)? The answer is clearly going to determine a lot about the effects of the tax. And that's not even getting into the issue of enforcement.
Ad valorem, using some monetization of utility? That would be quite the endeavor.
And what if you're into that tantric stuff -- does it count as a male orgasm if you don't ejaculate?
Is there a poverty line, below which you're not taxed?
5.2 Isn't that why the invented the phrase "can I take a rain check?"?
Surely I'd be willing to pay the cost of a beer in a bar to masturbate. Somewhere between a beer and a movie ticket seems reasonable. So $10 in NYC?
10: Yes, but you have to file for a sexemption.
Somewhere between a beer and a movie ticket seems reasonable.
So basically setting the rate based on the price of substitute goods? Sounds reasonable.
I see this as a secret Satanic plan to get people to have more pre-marital sex and extra-marital hook-ups while they or their spouses are traveling.
This gives new meaning to "married, filing jointly."
14 brings up the important issue of how this would relate to other sexual practices. Are they not taxed, in which case the masturbation tax has weird market-distorting effects? Or are they also taxed, maybe at a different rate?
This all brings up the additional question of why a tax like this would be instituted in the first place.
why a tax like this would be instituted in the first place
Because it's a vice!
17: you should really be varying grip and pressure Stanley.
17: I can't help but think the substantial revenue that could be raised might play a factor.
Arguably, since more masturbation keeps kids off the streets and could lead to less unwanted pregnancies, there should instead be some sort of subsidy.
How would the government incentivize self love?
I would definitely masturbate a lot more if I were being paid for it.
On the other hand, I would also pay a pretty high masturbation tax.
Why has the Republican coalition not come up with onanistic tax credits? Finally, my tube socks would pay for themselves.
On the other hand
Is there not a discount for using the other hand?
How about that 'Dutch rudder' business -- do both parties have to pay, or does it count as a protected mutual sexual act?
I hope the IRS auditors would get some kind of hazard pay. They'd certainly go through a lot of rubber gloves, regardless.
I object. It's discriminatory to balance the budget on the, uh, labors of single people. (And those in sexually dead relationships. Hi, folks!) It should at least be progressive. My marginally-satisfying wanking can hardly be priced the same as Bill Gates'. Although we'll also have to account for the fact that people with money can dodge the tax by paying someone else to do the work for them. Pretty clearly this is a slippery slope to a generalized sex tax.
11.1: Sadly, I think that was the only night we were both in the same city. It was a very appealing proposition, and I am too old to take advantage.
If you thought adolescence was traumatizing, just imagine if you had to declare to your parents the number of times you were on that slippery slope every April 15th.
31: It would be even worse if you happened to glance at their returns.
On the other hand, it might foster frank family discussions about sex.
I see an opportunity for automated TurboTax hookup to porn sites.
So when Jocelyn Elders said, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught", it was really just another tax-and-spend liberal ploy.
You just know Frank Luntz will reframe this as a little death tax.
Lots of extra work for studio accountants, you know, given how masturbatory most Hollywood films are.
31, 32: I would suggest there might be a way to make estimated payments at the family level rather than filing individual returns, but given that the teenagers are generally going to be the main drivers of the overall family masturbation level that probably wouldn't make the process any less awkward.
I really don't think the national deficit is an actual thing, as far as real economic stability is concerned, up to a point. Am I wrong, or do I just love masturbation too much to understand this question?
16: This all brings up the additional question of why a tax like this would be instituted in the first place.
Oh, there's ample legal precedent. Fornicating Under Consent of the King and all that.
I really don't think the national deficit is an actual thing, as far as real economic stability is concerned, up to a point.
It's an actual thing in some sense, but I think in this context it's just meant to indicate that the funds are going to something relatively uncontroversial so the focus is on the payment itself.
do I just love masturbation too much to understand this question?
I think loving masturbation a lot should make it easier to understand the stakes involved in this proposal.
This thread justifies the existence of the internet.
If I'm paying to masturbate, do I get to masturbate wherever I want?
If I'm paying to masturbate, do I get to masturbate wherever I want?
That's for the courts to decide.
49: I think Diogenes already set the precedent there.
Although actually the precedent of other vice taxes suggests no.
I mean, you can't just buy liquor anywhere.
Constitutionality hinges on whether the individual man date is a tax or a penalty
On a more somber note, when I was walking through the skyway, I saw to the right of me an older fellow in somewhat disheveled and dirty clothes, bent over a garbage can, frantically scratching at a stack of lottery cards. That's the kind of addictive behavior that has very little in the way of entertainment value to redeem it.
No, 36 wins.
It should at least be progressive. My marginally-satisfying wanking can hardly be priced the same as Bill Gates'.
I propose progressivity by reverse level of pleasure. Cry, cry, masturbate, cry is the top bracket.
To those who say, but this will induce people to minimize their tax by improving their technique, setting, and mental well-being, I say, mission accomplished.
Those who pass a means test will be eligible for wankfare.
Those who pass an ends test will get the opportunity to play a different role in the system.
Seems like there is a loophole (ahem) for the kinky types who like tease without satisfaction.
Men under 50 should get a federal subsidy to encourage them to masturbate more and save the government money on prostate treatments later.
On reflection, this seems viciously unfair. Is there a women-only condition in later life that can be subject to similar preventative treatment?
64: I had no idea that there was a connection between those two things.
This webmd article says that masturbation may be protective of men over 50. In men in their 20s and 30s who masturbate frequently (which is defined differently for the over 50 set) there may be a higher risk. They don't seem to think it's a causal relationship, just possibly that the higher sex drive in people genetically predisposed to hormone-sensitive prostate cancer will --duh-- be sensitive to high levels of the hormone which is causing them to have a high sex drive.
66.2: "Father, give me courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped*, and the insight to know the one from the other." Works for me!
*The past, for instance.
when I was walking through the skyway
You saw below you that ribbon of highway?
You just know Frank Luntz will reframe this as a little death tax
Well done, Eggplant.
You just know Frank Luntz will reframe this as a little death tax
Well done, Eggplant.
Hey baby, want to see my personal exemption?
A nice corollary of this tax is that if you take your new crush out on a fancy date, presumably you've saved and saved up for the date.
61 might be the most off-color comment I've ever read from Teo. Well done.
61 might be the most off-color comment I've ever read from Teo. Well done.
That seems implausible, but thanks.
I think we're done when teo aggressively asserts some musical opinion as objective truth while scornfully impugning the intellect, coolness and character of any who dare to disagree.
It's like you don't even remember my fervent defenses of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
Yeah, pretty much exactly like that.
It's interesting to get an occasional glimpse of how others perceive you.
But then, my musical taste is notoriously meaningless. I also like Taylor Swift.
That Pearl Jam song is okay, I guess. It's no "Poker Face," though.
It's interesting to get an occasional glimpse of how others perceive you.
Sounds like a good Mineshaft parlor game.
Cinnamon and sugar-y and softly spoken lies ...
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I just crocheted a cat! [/brag]
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85: I just crocheted a cat!
And now you a tax? Very nice!
So the other sex thread is turning into a dinosaur thread, and this one is turning into a Teo's Greatest Hits thread. Hmm.
If only ogged were here!
Countdown to Herpys link in 3 2 1
Couldn't we have some other freaky fetish this time, like birds or fish? Where's the love for the pescys?
I think we need an overrated/underrated dinosaur list. Here's the overrated category:
Archaeopteryx --- guess what motherfuckers, they were all proto-birds
Brontosaurus -- speaks for itself
Torosaurus -- Boola Boola
T-Rex -- controversial, but I think Spinosaurus eats its lunch
Fuck, that was for the other thread.
92: look, I did the hard work of finding Herpys. Rule 34 isn't free! You get lizards, dinosaurs, cartoon dinosaurs, cartoon dinosaurs with implausible huge, milk-spewing human breasts, dragons, car-fucking dragons, and turtles. You want something else, you google it.
Anyhow if teo had a secret bird fetish that seems like it'd get pretty dark.
95:
Archaeopteryx --- teo kill
Brontosaurus -- teo fuck
Torosaurus -- teo kill
T-Rex -- h teo marry.
Fixed!
Oh man I think I got Spinosaurus and Gigantosaurus confused.
Anyhow if teo had a secret bird fetish that seems like it'd get pretty dark.
Indeed, which is why 89 gets it exactly wrong.
Kobe, on the other hand, is all about the birdsex.
HEY KOBE TELL ME HOW MY BIRDASS TASTE
I think we need an overrated/underrated dinosaur list.
Deinocheirus is way underrated!
What about the smartest dinosaur?
105: the smartest dinosaur will be fine. The question is whether the other dinosaurs should be going to law school.
I'm aware that 105 is some kind of running joke but I've never figured out what it is.
What do you call the smartest dinosaur?
Doctor.
Law schools are full of dinosaurs. As is Laurens County. And, apparently, Mongolia.
(Horner wonders if, as a result of climate change, New Jersey will become like the Gobi and the Gobi like New Jersey.)
The transmogrification of wastelands!
(Sorry, Jerseyim. It just... it was just there right in front of me.)
I realize that I have never truly internalized the actual realities of the dinosaurs beyond my view as a 6-year old. So there are too many different kinds, they lived over too long a period, and what's this about differentiation across continents? There should be a dozen or so species, who all lived in the same place at the same time and then they DIED!
Instead we get shit like:
By the Early Cretaceous and the ongoing breakup of Pangaea, dinosaurs were becoming strongly differentiated by landmass. The earliest part of this time saw the spread of ankylosaurians, iguanodontians, and brachiosaurids through Europe, North America, and northern Africa. These were later supplemented or replaced in Africa by large spinosaurid and carcharodontosaurid theropods, and rebbachisaurid and titanosaurian sauropods, also found in South America. In Asia, maniraptoran coelurosaurians like dromaeosaurids, troodontids, and oviraptorosaurians became the common theropods, and ankylosaurids and early ceratopsians like Psittacosaurus became important herbivores. Meanwhile, Australia was home to a fauna of basal ankylosaurians, hypsilophodonts, and iguanodontians
I think it's more likely that New Jersey will become like Georges Bank and the Gobi will remain the Gobi, only more so.
114: Yeah, I knew a lot about dinosaurs as a kid, but it's only recently as I've begun to look into the recent research on them from time to time that I realize how much more complicated the situation actually was than I had realized. Part of that is my lack of awareness as a kid, but a big part of it is that paleontology has advanced enormously even in that short period.
Also, Dimetrodon is too a dinosaur. (It was in the set!)
The best dinosaur remains the pterodaustro
116: This is amazingly true. This year I found a book about dinosaurs and stable isotopes and my 6 year old self was so happy I had gone to grad school so I could read and understand about dinosaurs and SCIENCE!
Of course, the pterodaustro is a pterosaur, not a dinosaur.
Five years ago, when I last posted to the internet about the best old flying lizard, the only pictures that came up on the image search were from the picture book Caroline and I were reading. Now there's a longish wikipedia entry and all sorts of pictures. Also, Caroline no longer likes dinosaurs.
I do like the Therizinosaur, the 13-foot-tall, one-ton, sickle-clawed, and feathered dinosaur. They're described as lumbering and pot-bellied, and "But when we found peculiar bones of the massive hips, we knew we had a sickle-claw dinosaur."
I love that, thanks to Halford's commenting error, we now have two dinosaur threads.
Since the book that helpy-chalk recommends is out of print and out of date, does anyone have any good dinosaur book recommendations for memy kids? I'm currently reading to them from one of the books I had as a kid (printed: 1972), which I suspect is out of date. (Which means comments like 114/116/119 are completely foreign to me. Indeed, my recent experience has been "oh yeah, this is all coming back to me, exactly as I remembered." It's comforting. A newer book will probably therefore be psychologically jarring, but I'm willing to sacrifice for my children.)
The pterodaustro doesn't even look like a dinosaur. Just because it lived millions of years ago and is now extinct doesn't make it a goddamn dinosaur.
but I'm willing to sacrifice for my children
He says to get the thread back on track.
125: I often wonder about cerebrocrat. I keep hoping that he got some fabulous job as a neuroscientist and is too busy being productive to comment here.
my 6 year old self was so happy I had gone to grad school
This is a great typo.
Oh you're right. I read "that year" as though she had gone to grad school as a 6-year old.
I have fabulous memories of 2nd grade (age 6) being much more intellectually challenging than 1st grade, and I loved science then.
I was never a major dinosaur fan. I liked the artistic renditions, but not the fossils themselves.
122: I got this book, which is great. It's way too advanced to read to my kid (written at about the level of a smart 5th grader) but we enjoy looking at the pictures and I paraphrase some of the text. And it's totally up to date and I enjoy reading it personally, to the point that I'm frankly forcing it on the kid.
it's totally up to date and I enjoy reading it personally, to the point that I'm frankly forcing it on the kid
Thanks--this sounds like exactly what I'm looking for.
But your link doesn't work.
It works for me.
The title is "Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages" by Thomas Holtz.
Actually, your link may be fine, because on further investigation, as far as I can tell, no website on the internet currently works for me other than this one. That seems... odd.
No google, no amazon, no espn, no nytimes, no nothing. Just unfogged.
No google, no amazon, no espn, no nytimes, no nothing. Everyone around you is a total stranger.
Urple's turning Japanese I really think so (to bring the thread back on topic).
135: did you at some point edit your /etc/hosts? I admit, it sounds implausible.
Your DNS is hosed and you've put unfogged into your hosts file at some point.
it sounds implausible
In urple's world, anything is plausible.
People should plan to take their kids to the MOTR. The presentation is really interestingly done. And you might get a chance to argue with Horner.
Im at my son's last hockey game. The scrappy hippies of Hellgate are beating the pants of the spoiled preppies of Sentinel high. !>
Either that or you've been scandalously pwned. At some point.
Whatever the problem was, it seems to be resolved now.
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OMFG, my relatives up in NH are completely ridiculous. The cousin who was 'renting' my mom's house on the lake, without actually having paid rent about half the time, has apparently moved out -- two weeks ago -- without telling us. I have no idea what's going on. My other cousin wrote to say that she understands that the first cousin moved out {oh. i did not know that} and yet another cousin is interested in renting the place, what do I think?
AARRGH.
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What about the smartest dinosaur?
African Grey Parrot? They can do simple arithmetic. (Is too a dinosaur, don't believe anybody who tells you different.)
145: consider telling her that you'd prefer to have it be an arm's length business transaction after this experience and want to avoid renting it out to family.
96: You want something else, you google it.
Pablo Picasso was a Pescy. NSFW, natch.
(Is too a dinosaur, don't believe anybody who tells you different.)
Jack Horner: Although we have a planetarium in our museum, we don't really integrate it into the dinosaur hall, especially for the extinction, because, quite frankly, it's of little interest to me. The dinosaur hall reflects the good times of the dinosaurs, their behaviors, and growth, and ecology, and not their demise. Besides, at the end of the dinosaur hall we have a video displaying birds of the world, with a simple sign that reads "birds are living dinosaurs." So, no need to discuss the extinction "event." As far as dinosaurs are concerned, its one of those definition problems. They are still here in tremendous abundance.
The notion that birds are dinosaurs would be a lot easier to swallow if a lot of birds were 50 feet tall.
151: this whole "evolution" thing makes you wary, eh?
No, I'm prefectly happy to accept that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. But they're plainly not real dinosaurs. The word "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard". Birds are neither.
151. Not a lot of non-avian dinosaurs were 50 feet high. In reality, everybody's favourite Velociraptor was about the size of a large turkey (but with a long tail).
The word "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard". Birds are neither.
Neither were dinosaurs.
At least some dinosaurs were pretty damn terrible. And at least they sort of looked like lizards.
153. And the word Hippopotamus means river horse. Your point is?
The first dinosaur to be discovered was a biggish predator which was analogised to a lizard because in the middle of the 19th century they had no idea what the damn thing looked like or how it worked. That was then, this is now.
I mean, I know there are good reasons to think... I'm just stating the intuitive case. 50-foot birds would be more intuitively dinosaur-like.
Not a lot of non-avian dinosaurs were 50 feet high.
Of course, but everyone's fascinated by the ones that are. ("50 feet" is actually a bit of an exaggeration, granted. "Fucking big" is what I meant.)
That was then, this is now.
And what's different now?
What I don't understand is what difference is supposed to be implied by insisting that, no, birds aren't the evolved descendants of dinosaurs, they really are actually dinosaurs. No.. they're evolved! And we call that one big extinct group of things "dinosaurs", and we call the modern things "birds."
It's like claiming that there's no such thing as dinosaurs--the concept of "dinosaur" is just a misonomer, and what we're describing are pre-modern birds. Except, the dinosaurs were a lot of different things, some of which were the evolutionary anscestors of birds and some of which were very different from the evolutionary anscestors of birds, and which have no modern evolutionary descendants. Which is why saying that birds are descendants of dinosaurs makes sense, whereas birds=dinosaurs doesn't.
we call that one big extinct group of things "dinosaurs", and we call the modern things "birds."
With what justification?
And if you say "it makes intuitive sense to me based on what I learned from the 1972 book that I have" you will have failed to make a case.
I'm pretty sure Denver was the last dinosaur, guys. It was on television.
Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that onions are lilies. That is, those statements express biological truths, but there are some contexts in which it's useful to use narrower senses of 'dinosaur' and 'lily'.
How is "dinosaur" in any way a narrow term?
Sometimes birds do look like dinosaurs - e.g. gull and booby chicks just before and after they leave the nest look very reptilian.
With what justification?
Because one is extinct and the other isn't. And also because "bird" is a word used to describe a set of creatures that evolved from a set of other creatures, and those other creatures form a very limited subset of the full set of prehistoric creatures known as "dinosaurs", most of whom have no direct evolutionary descendants.
Phil Gramm really does look like a turtle, but he's probably not a turtle.
Because one is extinct and the other isn't.
One what? One group, okay. But how are those groups defined?
Because one is extinct and the other isn't.
Not technically true, of course, which is what I understand to be the point of the "birds=dinosaurs" crowd.
There's a difference between saying 'birds evolved from dinoasurs' and 'dinosaurs never really existed'.
I mean, you could say that "birds" are the set "animal species evolved from other animal species typically or historically classified as dinosaurs which are not exctinct". Okay! So was a Dodo a dinosaur? You could say "animal species evolved from other animal species typically or historically classified as dinosaurs which were extinct before the evolution of modern humans": okay! But I bet you I could easily find an example where urple would go "no, that's a bird". You could say "animal species evolved from other animal species typically or historically classified as dinosaurs that did not go extinct during the extinction event that killed a significant portion of the large animals on earth", well, okay. But that's not a very biological or meaningful definition. Is birdness really binary like that?
Can you tell I have a shitload to do today?
Dinosaurs had divided hearts, no backflow between ventricle and atrium, like birds not like modern reptiles. I don't know much about the anatomy of early birds or even what outgroup organisms are. Apteryx and Aepyornis would be my starting points.
This is pretty cool, though-- mass spec yielding dinosaur protein:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/P0C2W2.2
the point of the "birds=dinosaurs" crowd
Or the consensus view among palaeontologists, as it is sometimes known.
Birds are a subset of dinosaurs, which evolved quite early during the "age of dinosaurs" but isn't equally related to all the rest. Birds/All-dinosaurs-except-birds is not a coherent evolutionary dichotomy because there is no branching point from which Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus all go off along one line and birds go off along another.
I grant that birds are the direct evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs.
I honestly think a better way to resolve the issues in 171 is to redefine "dinosaur" to exlcude the direct evolutionary ancestors of birds. Then we can accurately say that dinosaurs and pre-modern birds roamed the earth together. And that the dinosaurs went extinct, as God intended.
Birds/All-dinosaurs-except-birds is not a coherent evolutionary dichotomy because there is no branching point from which Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus all go off along one line and birds go off along another.
But that was the exact point of my 151! If, along with African Greys and condors and robins and eagles and pelicans, we had winged diplodocuses and winged stegosauruses and winged tyrannosauruses and winged triceratopses (or evolved approximations thereof), then birds=dinosaurs would be a much easier sell.
Shoot, the first part of 176 was supposed to be in italics.
even what outgroup organisms are
Something like Anchiornis. Probably.
Couldn't you coherently get to 175 by defining 'birds', not as equivalent to dinosaurs, but as a particular (and the only surviving) subtype of dinosaurs? Whenever the branching event that split off the bird ancestor, everything after that is a bird -- birds survived to the modern era, all non-bird dinosaurs went extinct.
(Because dinosaurs generally clearly aren't birds: they have big heavy tails. </folk taxonomy>.)
Dude, no offense, but was there unusual mold on your breakfast today?
175 would be incoherent even if we had lots of ancient soft tissue with dates and places. The thing to look for is not wings but biochemistry sustaining an elevated metabolism in some lineages but not others. Lacking knowledge of dinosaur chemistry, reasoning from the handful of fossilized soft tissues available and the blood pressure of large animals is what is possible.
179 sounds to me like it's saying the same thing as 175?
181: No, 'birds' has to stay inside 'dinosaurs'. But you can talk about birds as the only surviving lineage of dinosaurs, and talk about the complete extinction of the non-bird dinosaurs.
176 makes sense only if you're obsessed with very large dinosaurs. Dinosaurs have pretty much always come in all shapes and sizes. Also, big birds usually don't fly: ostriches, cassowaries, moas etc. Their ancestors probably did, but there are engineering reasons why a 250 lb animal doesn't get airborne.
167: I wonder if you put him and Mitch Mcconnell in a jar, would they mate or fight?
You know what would be really cute? If Phil Gramm's nickname was "Tor"...
So why, of the dinosaurs, did only the bird lineage survive the extinction event?
No, 'birds' has to stay inside 'dinosaurs'.
It sounds like you're on the side of the paleontologists.
Nobody knows for sure, but more efficient metabolism would be a big advantage if the environment got colder. I keep meaning to read about the timing of the dinosaur extinction and Chixculub, apparently reason to think the meteor is not causal.
183 wasn't the point of 176 at all. I'm not obsessed but the big dinosaurs. I'd be happy with a little 5 lb flying triceratops. Or, conversely, big flightless winged diplodocuses.
187: Well, yeah. At the point when the bird ancestor had split off but the other dinosaurs weren't extinct yet, a contemporary taxonomist would have said "Birds: one subtype of the broadly successful class of Dinosaurs." Just because all the other subtypes died out doesn't move the birds out of the class of Dinosaurs.
189: I'd be happy with a little 5 lb flying triceratops.
As would every pre-teen on the planet.
I can't believe I can't find someone somewhere on the internet propounding the theory that humans only evolved intelligence, bipedalism, and language due to morphic field resonance with some advanced, extinct dinosaur race. Maybe I'm using the wrong search terms. I feel strongly that there should be a crackpot community devoted to this idea.
At the point when the bird ancestor had split off but the other dinosaurs weren't extinct yet, a contemporary taxonomist would have said "Birds: one subtype of the broadly successful class of Dinosaurs." Just because all the other subtypes died out doesn't move the birds out of the class of Dinosaurs.
Right, but the things that your contemporary taxonomist would have been looking at weren't the creatures you and I see today and call "birds". They were the evolutionary ancestors of those creatures.
I'd be happy with a little 5 lb flying triceratops.
There were plenty of small dinosaurs which weren't birds but could probably fly after a fashion - glide like a flying squirrel. They're not around any more.
193: Sure, just like the mammals that co-existed with the (non-bird) dinosaurs were all members of now-extinct species. But they were still mammals.
I got this book, which is great.
That does look good. Now I'm thinking about whether there's anybody for whom I could get it as a gift. Most of the people that I know with kids have younger kids.
The first review, which is glowing, by Mike Taylor who appears to be @sauropodmike carries some weight for me.
Right, but the things that your contemporary taxonomist would have been looking at weren't the creatures you and I see today and call "birds"
Way to move the goalposts! So only modern birds count as birds? Anyway, there were things recognisably related to ducks and geese wandering about by the late Cretaceous. And gliding Microraptors which definitely weren't birds. And land bound Gigantoraptors which weighed a couple of tonnes but were probably still feathered...
"A few species [nb:or is it just one species? do we know?] of dinosaurs surivived the mass extinction event, and became the direct evolutionary ancestors of the birds we see today."
I have no problem with that statement.
For that matter, extant birds are quite different from Jurassic and Cretaceous birds. Time passes, the environment changes... life evolves. Extant birds have been separated evolutionarily from the other coelurosaurian dinosaurs for some 150 million years, so they do look, act, and function quite differently, but science has shown us that they are closely linked by their common evolutionary history.
How is "dinosaur" in any way a narrow term?
There's a common use of 'dinosaur' to mean non-avian dinosaur.
If you say to a friend, 'there's a new dinosaur exhibit at the natural history museum. Let's go,' and there's only a bird exhibit, what you've said is misleading to the point of being false.
but the things that your contemporary taxonomist would have been looking at weren't the creatures you and I see today and call "birds"
Yes they were, as chris y points out. Archaeopteryx is a Jurassic fossil. By the Cretaceous you have flying creatures with toothless bills and feathered wings which you'd definitely class as "some kind of weird looking bird" if you saw them today. Birds appeared in recognisable form well before the extinction of the (other) dinosaurs.
202: yes, and if you said "there's a new primate exhibit" and it's all pictures of celebrities, likewise. That doesn't mean humans aren't primates.
It does mean that there's a use of 'primate' to refer to non-human primates.
I do not think that is the case, no.
205. Not really, unless you specify "non-human primate". If I saw an ad for a "primate exhibit" I wouldn't expect it to exclude humans any more than I'd expect it to exclude everything but archbishops. Most people are fine with speaking of "non-avian dinosaurs" to mean, well, non-avian dinosaurs.
Incidentally, a lot of important groups of birds went extinct at the K-T boundary along with the non-avian forms; it isn't that birds just went sailing serenely on.
One reason birds survived the extinction is that they're small. Apparently no land animal larger than a chicken survived the extinction. However, there's a certain amount of luck as well, since modern birds survived but other birds died out (e.g. Ichthyornis).
208: There were no small, non-bird dinosaurs?
There were a few 2-3 ft. ceratopsians still around in the late cretaceous, though that's still larger than a chicken. Otherwise small means theropods. There are plenty of small theropods which weren't birds (though they also weren't far off: bipedal, feathered, probably not so different in metabolism). But there's also lots of birds which didn't make it through the K-T.
201: Note that the K-T is 65 million years ago and that quote is says 150 million years ago. You could say the exact same thing about any dinosaur group that happened to survive the extinction, or for that matter about marsupials and placental mammals (which split over 160 mya).
208. Hundreds. I've referred to Anchiornis and Microraptor already. They were both about the size of a small crow. Velociraptor was about five feet long, but nearly two thirds of that was tail. There are small non-avian dinosaurs in the record from the Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous. They recently found a bone in England which suggests that the animal was about 40 cm long including tail, but there's not enough of it to describe properly. It may be the smallest one yet known.
(Note that 212 and 210 don't contradict each other, everything mentioned in 212 is a feathered theropod. Small dinosaurs were mostly bird-like, though not mostly birds.)
A few species [nb:or is it just one species? do we know?] of dinosaurs surivived the mass extinction event, and became the direct evolutionary ancestors of the birds we see today.
How about:
Some dinosaurs survived well past the KT extinction. All of these dinosaurs were birds. Several lineages of birds survived the extinction, e.g. the ancestor of ducks had already split from the ancestor of songbirds. After the KT extinction, birds underwent an adaptive radiation filling many niches that had been left open. This radiation lead to the diversity of birds that we see today.
Small dinosaurs were mostly bird-like
Don't let urple see this.
I'm going to just go ahead and violate the analogy ban...
Imagine that a meteor hit the earth tomorrow and the only mammals to survive were half-a-dozen species of mice. After another few million years we'd have lots of different kinds of mice. But mice would still be mammals, and more specifically rodents (just as birds are dinosaurs, and more specifically theropods). The mice from before the extinction would still look like mice, and you still would have lots of non-mice critters running around right before the extinction that are pretty mouselike.
216 is more or less exactly what I said.
Don't let urple see this.
But in a way this is the point. Small theropods were birdlike; birds are/were like other small theropods. It's actually quite hard to draw a bright line. Flying triceratops are neither here nor there.
Modern birds are certainly different from cretaceous birds (and different from each other). But you'd still recognize a late cretaceous bird as being a bird! In fact, if I showed you a late cretaceous bird and an obscure modern bird that you didn't know about, you probably wouldn't be able to figure out which was which.
Actually a really good museum exhibit would be something that at first glance looked like just a bunch of birds, but actually was a mix of birds and other small theropod dinosaurs. You could have an activity where you had people guess which of two pictures was a weird bird and which was an extinct non-bird small feathered theropod.
219: right, which is why it would make sense to talk separately about "late Cretaceous birds" and "dinosaurs", as I proposed. Late Cretaceous birds obviously coexisted with the dinosaurs.
But that's goofy. Non-bird feathered flying warm-blooded small theropods have way way way more in common with birds than they do with other dinosaurs.
But more specifically, how do you decide whether to call something not a dinosaur? Exactly which branch on this tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraves) do you want to cut off?
Couldn't you coherently get to 175 by defining 'birds', not as equivalent to dinosaurs, but as a particular (and the only surviving) subtype of dinosaurs? Whenever the branching event that split off the bird ancestor, everything after that is a bird -- birds survived to the modern era, all non-bird dinosaurs went extinct.
And, indeed, this exactly what paleontologists these days do.
Actually a really good museum exhibit would be something that at first glance looked like just a bunch of birds, but actually was a mix of birds and other small theropod dinosaurs. You could have an activity where you had people guess which of two pictures was a weird bird and which was an extinct non-bird small feathered theropod.
There's something like this at the new dinosaur hall at the LA natural history museum. Though I guess it's primarily Cretaceous birds and modern birds, with a few non-bird bird-like theropods thrown in the mix.
"Birds are dinosaurs" means "birds are a subset of dinosaurs." No one would ever say "dinosaurs are birds."
225: Nifty! Don't tell beamish it's a new dinosaur exhibit though.
"Birds are dinosaurs" means "birds are a subset of dinosaurs."
But birds are not a subset of dinosaurs! Birds are evolutionary descendents of (certain) dinosaurs!
I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm working with an incorrect definition of the word 'dinosaur'. What does that mean, when used in a technical sense?
Wikipedia isn't very precise, but says:
The fossil record indicates that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassic, and consequently they are considered a type of dinosaur in modern classification systems.[1][2] Some birds survived the extinction event that occurred 65 million years ago, and continue the dinosaur lineage to the present day.
This makes perfect sense to me, except for the part about "consequently they are considered a type of dinosaur in modern classification systems". How does having evolved from dionsaurs make one a dinosaur?
Exactly which branch on this tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraves) do you want to cut off?
Aves.
The usual technical definition of a dinosaur is that it is all direct descendants of the least common ancestor of triceratops and a chicken. But that begs the question in terms of this discussion.
230: And how did you decide that Jeholornis is not a dinosaur but that Scansoriopteryx is? And if your answer is "I just picked the one that was called Aves" you're going to run into the trouble that exactly which clad is called Aves is arbitrary and varies within the literature.
This makes perfect sense to me, except for the part about "consequently they are considered a type of dinosaur in modern classification systems". How does having evolved from dionsaurs make one a dinosaur?
This is all sophistry. Next you're going to deny your own status as a tree shrew.
And how did you decide that Jeholornis is not a dinosaur but that Scansoriopteryx is?
We don't know a ton about these animals, but based on what we do know it makes sense to put one on one side of the line and the other on the other. It wouldn't offend me if either or both were flipped as new information is uncovered. (But, honestly: just look at them. One looks like a bird and the other looks like a dinosaur. It's basically not that hard to tell the difference. Obviouslt these are only artists renderings, so might be inaccurate. But you get the point.)
exactly which clad is called Aves is arbitrary and varies within the literature
Again, I'm fine with shifting definitions and creatures that are difficult to classify at the margins. That's how evolution works. But that doesn't mean you can't draw a line at some point in the evolutionary sequence. That's the taxonomists' JOB. I mean, jesus, we're all the evolutionary descendants of the amphibians. But yet we're not amphibians.
There's two separate issues here.
On the one hand, there's a movement in modern biology to have names which don't refer to a clade (a clade is all descendants of something). From this point of view the usual notion of "reptile" is somewhat frowned upon (it either won't be used at all or will be used to mean Diapsid). Some people disagree with this point of view and like terms like reptile since non-archosaur diapsids do share a lot of relevant biological features (e.g. Gould argued against overemphasizing cladistics). From this point of view, of course dinosaur needs to include birds.
But there's another issue here which is that there's just no clear distinction between birds and other dinosaurs. We're not talking about a big important split in the history of dinosaurs. The difference between birds (modern or ancient) and other small theropods just isn't that big. Making it into a big distinction just doesn't fit with the facts when every day we're finding more and more small theropods and finding out that they had more and more in common with modern birds. If we were talking about something like the theropod/sauropod split, then it might make sense from some points of view to allow the everyday word dinosaur to have a non-cladistic definition (like we do with reptile in ordinary use). But we're not. It's a really small technical split that's hard to define and hard to recognize in practice.
Er "to stop having names which don't refer to a clade."
I do not think that is the case, no.
Do you think that there's a non-technical sense of 'lily' which doesn't include onions? Or a sense of 'animal' that doesn't include humans.
Anyway I think if you poke around more in the Paraves tree you'll see that the idea that there's a clear difference between things that look like birds and things that don't just doesn't hold up. Birds just aren't that different from other small theropods. (As opposed to say amniotes which are very different from amphibians.)
Do you think that there's a non-technical sense of 'lily' which doesn't include onions?
If there's a non-technical sense of "lily" that does include onions, this is the first I've heard of it.
Signed, someone who doesn't know very much about onions aside from their culinary uses, and who knows less about lilies.
Onions and garlic (and shallots and leeks and so on) are all lillies: Allium, if I'm spelling it right, is the genus name. Presumably, although I haven't tried, if you ate a tiger lily bulb, it'd be recognizably oniony, and likewise if you looked at a garlic flower, you'd recognize the lily shape.
We're not disinterested third-parties creating objective classification systems for all earth-creatures. We're human, so creating human-centric classification systems is a natural impulse. So separately classifying things that coexist or coexisted with humans and things that don't and didn't seems unproblematic to me.
No one is saying that you can't have a workable category "birds," just that you can't have a workable category "dinosaurs" that doesn't include birds. All birds are dinosaurs does not mean that all dinosaurs are birds. As I know that we both took the LSAT I will not elaborate further.
No one is saying that you can't have a workable category "birds," just that you can't have a workable category "dinosaurs" that doesn't include birds.
And the latter statement is what I don't accept.
Non-amniotic amphibians have a lot of important properties that they share, which amniotes do not share. For example, their eggs need to be in water and their young typically use gills. Similarly, non-archosaur reptiles have important properties in common (low metabolism, primitive breathing system, sprawling gate). As a result you can give coherent definitions of "amphibians" or "reptiles" which are non-cladistic but still capture a useful notion. (Note though that counting crocodilians as "reptiles" is kinda goofy and not something you should do.)
Non-avian dinosaur just isn't a useful category like the above two. Basically the only time you want to use "non-avian dinosaur" is for the non-biological historical statement "all non-avian dinosaurs died out in the KT extinction event." But then you can just say "almost all dinosaurs died out in the KT" and still communicate the same point.
Why do you think it's useful to have a single word for "non-avian dinosaur" while making it difficult to refer to "dinosaurs and birds" rather than the other way around?
Why do you think it's useful to have a single word for "non-avian dinosaur" while making it difficult to refer to "dinosaurs and birds" rather than the other way around?
I'm finding it difficult to believe this is a serious question. Isn't the opposite question more appropriate?
The fundamental problem with this birds/dinosaurs thing is that it makes dinosaurs not as cool.
Also, it derailed a perfectly good masturbation thread.
247 gets it backwards, it makes birds cooler!
248: You obviously haven't been following the herpy links.
Right. You're telling me I can satisfy my dinosaur sex kink by fucking a common sparrow; I'm telling you that's bullshit.
249: Ask yourself this: Jurassic Park with oversize turkeys—cooler?
I've always liked the oversized florae of dinosaur days.
You're welcome to say "I have a kink for large dinosaurs" if that's what you mean.
Cause if fucking a turkey doesn't do it for you, then it seems unlikely you'd get off fucking this critter.
248 both gets it exactly right and seems to have worked nicely to re-rail the thread.
One problem with the bird/dinosaur issue may be that this issue is in flux. The morphological traits that have signalled 'bird' have one by one been found in dinosaurs. Most recently the divide was being with feathers = bird, no feathers /= bird. All the other skeletal characteristics had been found in dinosaurs so feathers were all that were left. Of course there were some proto-birds that that feathers but 'everyone' knew these were just the dinosaur ancestors of birds.
But then it turned out these proto-birds were not directly related to the bird lineage, they were old branches that had gone extinct. And then it turned out, when better fossils were found or better work was done with existing fossils, that a lot of the traditional dinosaurs had feathers.
So now there isn't really one single trait you can use to say dinosaur or bird.
In order to say that birds are not dinosaurs, you really need a very precise definition of bird that excludes dinosaurs while retaining all of the birds and that's just not something people have figured out. Maybe we're working towards one but as Unfoggitarian points out, there is probably not a lot of occasions where the distinction is important.
You know there is a relevant xkcd comic about this, right?
I think this is a pretty good discussion of the issue.
A four-legged somewhat croc-like ancestor gave rise to:
• More croc-shaped creatures
• More four-legged creatures including many famous dinosaurs
• Flying dinosaurs (Pterosaurs)(probably)
• Two-legged creatures, which included
• Many famous two-legged dinosaurs like T-Rex
• A bunch of dinosaurs that had various features that birds are now famous for, which included
• A bunch of things that went extinct and were not birds but were bird like in important ways
• Birds
This presents an intriguing version of Neurath's boat, where instead of rebuilding it exactly the same, we start adding feathers, giving it wings, shrinking it enormously and generally making it about 50x lamer than it was originally. IS IT THE SAME BOAT?!
My non-flippant position, which I think has me in beamish's camp, is that it's silly to think that the biological/paleontological concept/category of dinosaur has some sort of absolute priority over other uses of the word "dinosaur," even if it's the case that the former is more coherent (and for structural reasons, it ought to be). We use the word "dinosaur" to do various different things; only occasionally are the vast majority of us using it in a way that makes tying it to [whatever the current biological/paleontological usage is] sensible.
Similarly, if I'm asking for suggestions about which vegetables to add to my salad, and you suggest tomatoes, and I say, "that's a fruit," I'm not engaging in a cooperative sharpening of our discursive tools, I'm being an asshole.
If someone tried to revoke Scaphognathus's victory in my 3rd-grade Dinosaur Class President contest on the grounds that pterosaurs aren't part of the clade Dinosauria, that person would be being a little bitch--and so would someone who tried to nominate, say, a modern-day turkey as a candidate. I trust that the third-graders of this country have the right instincts, here, and would not allow such little-bitchiness to stand.
Ok. Now the thread can go back to masturbating, not that you needed my permission.
The thing about "dinosaur" is that the paleontological concept is really the whole game. Every mention of dinosaurs, every conception of dinosaurs, even the existence of dinosaurs is directly based on paleontology. So saying that there's no reason to privilege the paleontological concept over whatever inaccurate ideas have percolated through popular culture based on different iterations of the paleontological concept is silly. Would you advocate doing the same with, say, "evolution"?
The thing about "dinosaur" is that the paleontological concept is really the whole game.
Yes, exactly. There are plenty of topics on which scientific and folk understandings differ in various ways, and under certain circumstances it may make sense to go with folk rather than the scientific versions. But with dinosaurs all the "folk" understandings are just holdovers from previous eras of scientific understanding, so I don't see any reason to privilege them.
263 is written sort of terribly. I blame the fact that my brain is mush.
I just gave you one very good goddamn reason. Dinosaur elections! "Who was the coolest dinosaur?" It totally makes sense to let pterosaurs compete; it's really stupid to let ostriches compete.
Also, as I said, dinosaur sex fetishes.
I truly believe that herpy.net is unlikely to be phased by the rise of cladistics. And it's not like somebody's going to retcon Land Before Time and make it about sandpipers. There still were cool, giant animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Nobody can take that away from you.
I do get what Sifu and Teo are saying, and I half agree with it, but only half. Etiology isn't destiny, and I think there really is a current use that's not just a mistake. The use I'm talking about--folk version, I suppose--maps reasonably well onto "Mesozoic-Era Megafauna"--although that's actually too restrictive, because we want our velociraptors, too, which, yes, weren't that big. But even if it were perfect in reference, MEM is ten goddamn syllables. It's pretty unreasonable to expect people to use that instead of "dinosaurs," just for the sake of a bunch of pencil-necked pedants. Besides, this way, the pedants get to correct them, and we all know that's their favorite way of getting off, anyhow. (See what I just did there?)
It's true that there was a time in my life when dinosaur-related pedantry was my favorite way of getting off, but that was several years before I discovered masturbation.
Pedantry tax. There's one I could get behind.
MEM includes lots of awesome totally non-dinosaurs. Not just pterosaurs (which aren't dinosaurs but are very close), but some crazy crocodilians, mosasaurs, ictheosaurs, and pleiseasaurs.
There's nothing wrong with finding megafauna more exciting. People like elephants and rhinos more than mice and shrews. But you can just say "cool dinosaurs" if you want to eliminate the little ones you don't care for.
And it's not like somebody's going to retcon Land Before Time and make it about sandpipers.
Bravo.
x.trapnel gets it exactly right. No one here is arguing about biology. But while "I saw some colorful little dinosaurs walking around my backyard this morning" may be a true statement in a biological sense, it's a false and misleading statement in most important senses.
That was the basic point of my original 151: I think people would be intuitively more comfortable adjusting the calling birds "dinosaurs" if they were 50 feet tall and terrifying.
All large-category words have the property that people tend to have a picture of certain examples in their head. If a kid says they like animals, they probably don't mean beetles and ants (even though by numbers a plurality of land animals are insects).
Everyone knows that when you hear the word dinosaur the picture in your head will not be a small theropod. But that doesn't mean that small dinosaurs weren't dinosaurs. It just means that people who like dinosaurs tend to like the big extinct ones.
NYTimes has some dinosaur news about something that definitely is not a bird, but nonetheless all you bird-haters probably wouldn't like: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/science/feather-cells-tell-of-microraptors-crowlike-sheen.html?hp
No one is saying that you can't call a T-Rex or an Apatosaurus a dinosaur, just that birds are also dinosaurs.
Anyhow, I've been training my kid from the earliest stage of dinosaur interest (OK, this "interest" was possibly force fed from Dad, it's true) to call birds "dinosaurs" and acknowledge that dinosaurs are still around in the form of birds, so the young people of the future won't be left stranded on ignorance island with Trapnel and Urple.
276 -- oh snap it looks like science just blew up in your face, team BAND.
I think I may be able to broker a compromise on this. Since, as far as I can tell, the word "dinosaur" has no technical scientific meaning, but is a colloquialism, how about we let it have its colloquial meaning (as I've been arguing), but we grant that the taxon Dinosauria includes both dinosaurs and birds (so we're not doing any violence to the taxonomy). Deal?
What kind of compromise is that? You're asserting a "colloquial" definition of dinosaurs that excludes birds on no basis at all and that doesn't seem to mean much of anything other than "dinosaurs are not birds because I say so." No dice.
Well, the compromise is that I'll join you in saying that birds are Dinosauria. Just not dinosaurs.
You're asserting a "colloquial" definition of dinosaurs that excludes birds on no basis at all
Really? You don't think "I saw some colorful little dinosaurs walking around my backyard this morning" would confuse anyone, not at all?
It would be weird, but no more so than "I saw some primates hanging out in my office today" when you are referring to humans. Doesn't mean humans aren't primates. No one's saying that you can't use a more specific word -- birds -- to refer to modern birds, and that obviously would be more immediately communicative in modern English. It's just the insistence on excluding birds from the concept "dinosaur" that's at issue.
Or, UPETGI's example is great. "I saw some animals walking around in the backyard today" would be confusing if you meant ants.
My bigest problem is the implication that "dinosaurs" aren't really extinct. That's bullshit. Dinosaurs' direct evolutionary descendants live on, in the form of modern birds, but the dinosaurs themselves have all died off. Any definitional tricks that imply otherwise are sophistry.
People like elephants and rhinos more than mice
They're probably easier to catch when they hang out in your apartment, but I don't think the glue trap and mallet or snake in closet treatment works as well.
285 proves the point. You're actually mistaken on the facts. Not all dinosaurs died off. Some of them survived. That's the whole point. There were lots of dinosaurs in the cretaceous and without the benefit of hindsight you wouldn't have thought "oh these ones aren't really dinosaurs, they're birds."
They're probably easier to catch when they hang out in your apartment, but I don't think the glue trap and mallet or snake in closet treatment works as well.
You just need a really big mallet, or a really big snake.
Not all dinosaurs died off. Some of them survived.
But this begs the question--it's only true if you define "dinosaurs" to include birds.
without the benefit of hindsight you wouldn't have thought "oh these ones aren't really dinosaurs, they're birds."
This is true, but fortunately I do have the benefit of hindsight. Given that, I'm quite able to say, "oh these ones aren't really dinosaurs, they're birds."
Dinosaurs' direct evolutionary descendants live on, in the form of modern birds, but the dinosaurs themselves have all died off.
Basically it sounds like urple wants to define "dinosaurs" and "birds" such that this statement is true by definition. I think that's kind of a dumb way to approach the issue, but I don't think anyone's going to be able to convince him of that.
290 probably gets it right. I think it's obviously unscientific to say "well it will turn out that 100 million years from now by dumb luck the descendants of this dinosaur will survive a meteor strike, so you can't call this guy or its descendants over the next 100 million years dinosaurs because otherwise we won't be able to say that the dinosaurs all went extinct."
If it turns out that baby tyrannosaurus rex had fluffy yellow feathers and looked like a chick would that change your mind?
The pedants are absolutely right on this and urple wrong, but at a more fundamental human level they are far wronger than urple and should be killed. Granted that "dinosaur" originated with the early conception of what has become in recent decades a cladistic Dinosauria and so the paleontologists have first dibs, but in this instance I actually do think it might have been better to let the colloquial definition fly free and detach the terms.
Some might even find it perversely amusing that the creationists have it right when they claim humans co-existed with dinosaurs.
I'm not actually trying to be pedantic, I don't really care for pedantism. The point is that science has made a cool discovery and now we know something we didn't know before! The claim is that birds actually are dinosaurs in the colloquial sense of dinosaur, not just technically dinosaurs.
There were birds in the age of dinosaurs, and those birds didn't look very different from what lots of canonical "dinosaurs" looked like. Velociraptors looked a lot like birds. A baby T. Rex looked a lot like a bird. Many of our best guesses for extinct dinosaur behavior come from thinking of them as bird-like. T Rex held it's body like a sandpiper. One of the main reasons Sauropods were able to grow to the sizes that they grew is that they shared the same breathing system as birds.
293: Sure, and the link in 259 provides a good overview of things like the breathing. I just think that you can capture that very well with "birds are Dinosauria". Not something I have a strong opinion on and I vacillated on posting the thought. You are more careful in your comment than most science writers in not using "dinosaurs" to implicitly describe only pre-65M years ago Dinosauria.
Here's a quote that I think captures the point I'm trying to make, from Norell, Curator-in-Charge of fossil reptiles, amphibians and birds at AMNH:
"The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds."
You know what else is silly about urple's theory? Late cretaceous dinosaurs were far more temporally distant from their Jurassic dinosaur ancestors than birds are from their cretaceous dinosaur ancestors. So all else being equal theropods from the late (or even middle!) Cretaceous would be expected to be much more like modern birds than a jurassic archaeopteryx.
More broadly, dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrates on the planet for 135 million years[1]. Claiming that somehow they ceased to exist just because they haven't been as dominant over the past 65 million is very silly.
I think it's obviously unscientific to say "well it will turn out that 100 million years from now by dumb luck the descendants of this dinosaur will survive a meteor strike, so you can't call this guy or its descendants over the next 100 million years dinosaurs because otherwise we won't be able to say that the dinosaurs all went extinct."
I think it's obvious the terminology would be different if humans had been around the whole time, working on their taxonomies all along. But we haven't. And I don't see why it's so important to rewrite our vocabulary as if we were. We're doing all this after the fact. And given that, I don't see why it's not useful to allow our vocabulary to distinguish between the things that went extinct and the things that didn't.
Again, if all we'd found were a fossils of a bunch of prehistoric birds, that's probably what we'd have called them in the first place. Prehistoric birds. And I understand that what we in fact found were a lot of fossils of things that we didn't originally realize are prehistoric birds, but now that we've learned more about them we know that's exactly what they are. But that's not all we found. We also found lots and lots and lots of other animals that bear some anatomic similarities but lots of differences to birds. "Velocipators were prehistoric birds" isn't a statement that bothers me. It's true. Whereas "birds are really dinosaurs" is just pedantic.
I just don't see a good reason why "the dinosaurs are extinct" can't be taken as axiomatic, and our vocabulary built around it.
And, as I said upthread, I'd be perfectly happy to abandon that axiom if we discovered some new creature that was still living and that is a dinosaur. But we haven't discovered any new creatures. We've known about birds since time immemorial. So the fact that we've now learned that a lot of dinosaurs were actually prehistoric birds is very interesting (and that most or all dinosaurs shared certain bird-like anatomic features), and I agree this helps us understand a lot of interesting things about the dinosaurs. But that doesn't mean we need to call sparrows "dinosaurs".
I'm on urple's side here. But if the dinosaur media industrial complex had been trying to convince me all these years that dinosaurs had feathers, instead of showing them all with skin like alligators, I'd probably feel differently.
I can't help feeling that Jurassic Park would have been a bit less impressive if they all looked like Big Bird.
300: Although actually per the movie that freaked you out thread, it might have added a new dimension of horror in a "Chucky" kind of way.
I know I'm not the only one who thinks urple is being silly. But am I the only one who thinks the fact that birds are dinosaurs makes the whole dinosaur thing even cooler?
Baby birds look mighty dinosaurish.
Look at this freaky-ass prehistoric shit.
Hey, these people agree with urple!
If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.
I'm not sure exactly what ground "animals like velociraptor" is supposed to cover, but if it's meant to refer to velociraptors themselves, this seems completely false. I mean, sure, your literal first impression on seeing one at a distance might be that it was just a very unusual looking bird--it would look much more like a bird than like anything else you'd be expecting to see out on a walk in the forest. But the minute you got a closer look it would be clear that this thing wasn't some funny looking bird. It had a long, stiff tale. It had clawed hands on its wings. It had serrated teeth, for chrissakes. That thing's definitely not a fucking bird, you'd say.
302: Sure, the fact that birds are Dinosauria makes the whole dinosaur thing even cooler.
I didn't say nothing like a bird. Quite like a bird. But obviously not a bird.
310: Now that cellphone cameras are ubiquitous, it's amazing the insight we can get into nature.
302: I think it makes it much cooler in that allows us to understand much more about the dinosaurs.
But the minute you got a closer look it would be clear that this thing wasn't some funny looking bird. It had a long, stiff tale. It had clawed hands on its wings. It had serrated teeth, for chrissakes. That thing's definitely not a fucking bird, you'd say.
Maybe it would help to look at an order in a different group? Acanthopterygii includes everything from freshwater eels to flying fish to seahorses. It wouldn't be accurate to look at any of those and exclaim that they weren't a fish.
Perhaps we should divide them into the Coolosaurs and Lameosaurs. And then people can segregate themselves according to which prehistoric animals they like.
314 is a fair point.
I'd never really thought about it, but I guess dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken.
And the Smartestosaurs, of course.
And obviously I'm not the first person to have the thought. "More like hawk than chicken," according the Slate.
Although it probably would depend on whether the dinosaurs were farm-raised or wild caught.
Hey everyone, I think I'll eat dinosaur for lunch today! Haha I'm so clever.
Dinosaur meat is unsustainable, Urple.
No heebie it isn't because you see BIRDS are really DINOSAURS so when I saw I was having DINOSAUR for lunch I was thinking of a CHICKEN SANDWICH! See what I did there?
OH MY GOD, A DINOSAUR JUST FLEW BY MY WINDOW! NO REALLY GUYS I'M SERIOUS!
This is serious, Urple. A dinosaur attack would be accompanied by widespread panic and chaos. Quit fear-mongering.
One last comment in my chimeric quest to make common cause somewhat with trapnel but not urple.
In general I view attempts to keep broadly-used classifications that have entered the general lexicon in lock step with current cladistic nomenclature as misguided and somewhat redolent of a certain type of little bitchery. I think the language is better served by using the more technical terms for the (potentially quite rapidly-shifting) understanding of paleontological evidence and evolutionary history. Now, as these things go, because the birds are so solidly within the Dinosauria clade (contrast the gyrations for preserving a coherent and technically correct definition of reptiles as noted above) it is no big deal and I could go either way.
Commenter certainly makes a lot of good points above, and his quote from the curator at AMNH is quite relevant. Looked at some of the AMNH material and like Commenter they tend to e precise and careful in using dinosaur in its new scientifically-correct-as-of-the-moment way, but even there you do not have to read very far to get something like:
Some dinosaurs, such as the Barosaurus, were quite large and may have weighed as much as 35 tons. But other dinosaurs, such as Compsognathus, were about the size of a chicken and weighed only eight pounds.
Or you know, Gallus gallus domesticus is about the size of a chicken.
Well look, people always get hung up on using category words to describe non-canonical members of that category. When people say "fruit", they don't generally mean "tomato". When people say "dog" they don't usually mean "dingo". When people say "dinosaur" they don't generally mean "bird". That's fine! Is it particularly confusing because "bird" and "dinosaur" are both basic-level categories? Could be! That is an interesting quirk of human psychology, right there. But saying "birds aren't dinosaurs" is just as wrong as saying "tomatoes aren't fruits" or "dingoes aren't dogs". Which is to say, exactly wrong.
Led Zeppelin gets it right, "'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings."
Coolosaur or Lamosaur? (This picture doesn't have scale, it's 9 feet tall).
328: kinda looks like it can shoot lasers out of its hand/wing/claw doohickeys. Good stuff.
Coolosaur or Lamosaur? (Got to about 12 feet tall.)
It's just not the same when you put feathers over its naughty bits.
331: "Stock Photo: Fallen Angel sexy woman who is nude except for the feathers covering her important part as viewed from above"
It is true that New Zealand and some other parts of Oceania were doing a pretty job of meeting the requirements of the classically-imagined "Lands Before Time" before we showed up.
And I'll totally hire Sifu Tweety to steal do the music for my upcoming The Land After Time which commences after the egg-stealers flame out like the wise birds knew they would all along and the dinosaurs reclaim their rightful place in the scheme of things.
I nominate "important part" as the euphemism of the day.
332: In total, her important 'part' seems to have an interesting shape.
Coolosaur or Lamosaur (3 feet long including the tail).
When the children's dinosaur toy sets start looking like 337, then you'll have a point. Until then, I'm right.
(Fwiw, large animals like Elephants usually lose their insulating covering. So it's expected that an adult T. Rex would have lost its feathers.)
I'm willing to compromise to "In every day use the word dinosaur refers to fictional animals which appear in movies and kids toys. As such it should never be used to refer to a real animal alive or dead."
338: Don't worry, when we dinosaurs[deprecated] die off they will.
large animals like Elephants usually lose their insulating covering. So it's expected that an adult T. Rex would have lost its feathers.
If it lived somewhere cold (like the woolly mammoth or the polar bear) it'd keep them.
But nowhere was cold like that during the relevant time periods. Remember that we're in an ice age (at least for the next 50 years or so).
340: Are you willing to insert "and represented scientific understanding for decades"?
340: I'm not! I mean, the reason that dinosaurs are cooler than dragons (or anyhow cool in a different way than dragons) is that they aren't fictional. They're real, and we learn about them with Science, and thus Science is Neat.
Maybe the real dinosaurs had too much phlogiston in them so they caught on fire when Xenu set off the volcanoes with the nuclear bombs?
Someone crossed the aether beams.
344: How about and tend to represent scientific understanding of Dinosauria at the time when the people making the movies were children?
348: Sure along with "and for many decades before that".
There is clearly a deeper subtext to this (pretty minor on my part) disagreement which reflects both a mixture of worthy and unworthy motives on my side. Not the time or context to pursue further but it is related to some further thinking I've done on things touched upon in the Wegener/Continental Drift/Plate tectonics and mechanisms thread.
My impression is that the current popular conception of dinosaurs is actually roughly the scientific conception of dinosaurs while Michael Chrichton was researching Jurassic Park. But that doesn't reflect a consensus of decades. The science was in rapid rapid flux at the time, which is part of why it was an exciting topic for a book. I'm not even sure which time-period you're referring to (pre-renessaince? post-renessaince?). The popular conception includes lots of 80s and 90s research (Velociraptors, rapid movement, related to birds, a meteor strike, etc.).
I think most people these days are aware that dinosaurs were closely related to birds, and that many were quite bird-like.
Was that information in Jurassic Park? I honestly don't remember.
I don't think there are many people left who would be surprised by the idea of feathered dinosaurs, for example.
Until very recently, one could say that most Americans don't believe in evolution.
You'd better check in with LizSpigot before you claim that kind of generalization.
354 seems dubious. I think the vast majority of (educated) people who claim not to believe in evolution are doing so basically out of religious/cultural affinity. I suspect if pressed about the biology they would agree on the specific facts with respect to how things actually work.
(Unless you're excluding from "people who believe in evolution" anyone who thinks an intelligent higher power had some grand plan for the whole process--I think there are quite a few of those people--but that seems like a silly exclusion, if they agree about the biology.)
(I've certainly met plenty of people who absolutely do not believe in evolution. But they're fringe elements.)
People are good at holding contradictory beliefs, and just choosing not to think about it too hard. A lot of people do this on the topic of evolution.
351 is indeed roughly what's in JP, though in JP the details of the bird/dinosaur link are somewhat speculative. (Certainly they didn't yet know that velociraptors had feathers.)
I was kinda hoping my "Coolosaur or Lamosaur" questions would get answered, as I think they do a good job capturing the fact that any attempt to map the "coolosaur/lamosaur" distinction onto a "dinosaur/bird" split is doomed to failure.
This may be useful for the disagreement between JP and Pause.
361: Ah yeah, I stumbled on that one last night but did not really read it.
But I'm well and truly trapped in PowerPoint hell the rest of the day. (As I've hinted at/stated explicitly, there are a few aspects of my work that have gone completely through the Dilbert/Work is Hell looking glass. For chrissakes, I'm in my late '50s--listen everyone, get tenure, or start your own business, or go on the dole, or something mumble something, the large organization endgame can be quite damaging to your self-image*).
*I'm actually most annoyed that I'm letting it get to me. Alternative advice: Do whatever the fuck you want as long as it builds a strong, healthy, unassailable self-image that results in your exuding a calm, placid, and awesome demeanor even in the face of terminal fatuousness.
I was going by self-reporting to the Gallup organization, among others.
Few people know that Hanna Montana is descended from Mileysaurus.
The dinosaur book I read to my children tonight (and that was read to me as a child) says clearly that dinosaurs were "egg-laying reptiles", that "Dinosaurs grew so big because any large animal takes a long time to heat up or cool down. Therefore, their size helped them to keep their body temperature more stable" and contains the following: "COULD DINOSAURS HAVE BEEN WARM-BLOODED? There is evidence that dinosaurs had better blood supplies that the cold-blooded reptiles we know today, but most scientists believe they were more similar to cold-blooded reptiles than to any other creatures that are alive today. However, some experts have argued that some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded, like modern mammals. This is the subject of significant discussion in paleontology today."
I understand those points are more or less considered to be outdated today. However, here are the parts that are relevant to the thread:
"WHY DID DINOSAURS BECOME EXTINCT?"
No one knows. Fossil evidence proves conclusively that all dinosaurs became extinct about 64 million years ago, in a relatively short period of time.... There are numerous theories about their extinction. Many believe that there may have been a sudden, cataclysmic weather condition which affected the whole world. Another, more sophisticated idea suggests that the balance of male and female dinosaurs may have become unstable, and the successful breeding may therefore have become impossible. This is the subject of significant discussion in paleontology today.
And finally:
"ISN'T IT POSSIBLE THAT EVEN ONE SPECIES OF DINOSAUR MAY HAVE SURVIVED?"
Well, yes, it is possible! Some people believe that "lake monsters"--for instance, the famous Loch Ness monster--may be living examples of plesiosaurs, which are still living in deep, dark waters. You don't believe it? Then think about the Coelacanth [pictured]. This fish was thought to have been extinct for 70 million years--until one was caught by a trawler in 1938. Since then, many more have been found.
So you didn't read your kids the part about the birds?
365 is in support of what particular point?
Dinosaurs are extinct. If any are alive, it's the Loch Ness monster (or something like it); not blue jays. This was the point I made in 298.2.
Also, I just thought the male-female imbalance theory of extinction was really weird. (I didn't remember that from when I was a kid--probably it went right over my head.)
How exactly would that happen for many different species, worldwide, all in a relatively narrow time span (on a geologic scale)?
I like the logic of 365. "This book is full of outmoded stuff, like saying that dinosaurs were basically cold-blooded. And it agrees with me! See? I'm right!"
370: Here's a relatively recent discussion--basically sex ratios of eggs strongly affected by temperature (but you'll notice it does not help you one bit on the bird thing).
THE SCIENCE OF THE EARLY 1970S WILL NEVER BE BEAT THAT WAS WHEN ALL OF THE SCIENTISTS WERE LIKE TOTALLY DOING LUDES AND HAVING SWINGER PARTIES. ANYTHING MORE RECENT IS IRRELEVANT.
But seriously, who's a more plausible candidate for "living example of a dinosaur"? The Loch Ness monster or a goddamn turkey?
I am actually worried that I might be teaching my kids bad information. I mean, I said "this is an old book, and scientists have learned new things since this was written", but that might not really stick, unless I also get a newer book to read from sometimes, so they can see some of the differences.
When I was in third-grade I had a long-running argument with a classmate about whether the Loch Ness monster could be a plesiosaur or not. I think there was some book claiming that plesiosaurs laid eggs on land, and I insisted that if the Loch Ness Monster emerged to lay eggs people would have caught it.
Plesiosaurs weren't dinosaurs, you know.
They are if you define "dinosaur" in its colloquial sense of "things Urple thinks are dinosaurs."
Forget it, urple. It's the Cenozoic era.
378: No idea how accepted this is but:
F. Robin O'Keefe, a paleontologist at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., and Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, teamed up to study the only known fossil of a plesiosaur mother and her unborn baby. The ancient relic is considered the first evidence that these aquatic behemoths gave birth in the water instead of laying eggs on land, the researchers reported online Thursday in the journal Science.
It really makes me too sad to think this book is garbage. I'm buying an updated book, but I'm going to make my wife read it to this kids.
The book's not garbage, Urpie. Trying to hang on to outdated beliefs about birds is garbage.
But seriously, who's a more plausible candidate for "living example of a dinosaur"? The Loch Ness monster or a goddamn turkey?
I'll go with a goddam turkey, since the Loch Ness monster is not a plausible candidate for living example of anything.
This discussion has made me curious about some of the history of the use of "dinosaur". There is probably a good source I'm not finding, but two data points:
1) Encyclopedia Brittanica 11th ed. (1910-11) did not have a specific entry on 'Dinosauria" or "dinosaur" although most of the well-known species are described as such. From the "Sauropsida" entry:
Comparative anatomy clearly shows that birds are closely allied to reptiles; enthusiasts even spoke of them as "glorified reptiles," and this view seemed to receive its proof by the discoveries of Archaeopteryx, and the numerous bipedal Dinosaurs. But Archaeopteryx was after all a bird, although still somewhat primitive, and the question, what group of reptiles has given rise to the birds? is still unanswered. By irony of fate, mere lack of the fossil material, it has come to pass that the bridges between Amphibia and reptiles and from them to Mammals are in a fairer way of reconstruction than is that between reptiles and birds, the very two classes of which we know that they "belong together."And further from the bird entry: Consequently the ankle-joint of birds is absolutely cruro-tarsal and tarso-metatarsal, i.e. intertarsal, an arrangement absolutely diagnostic of birds if it did not also occur in some of the Dinosaurs.
2) N-gram of Dinosaur/dinosaur and Dinosuaria. Several interesting trends.
391(2): wow, what exactly happened in the late 1970s? I know there was new research/discoveries, but jesus.
Well, yes, it is possible! Some people believe that "lake monsters"--for instance, the famous Loch Ness monster--may be living examples of plesiosaurs, which are still living in deep, dark waters. You don't believe it? Then think about the Coelacanth
God this comparison makes me want to punch the author in the face. The persistence of species in the deep ocean is not the fucking same as a plesiosaur magically finding its way into into a glacially carved lake in the highlands.
392: I bet it's some kind of kid toy marketing thing, not science.
Another, more sophisticated idea suggests that the balance of male and female dinosaurs may have become unstable, and the successful breeding may therefore have become impossible.
Something tells me this theory originated at Imperial College, London, where the catastrophe it hypothesises has been happening for some decades now.
The persistence of species in the deep ocean is not the fucking same as a plesiosaur magically finding its way into into a glacially carved lake in the highlands.
I am now picturing gswift standing on the top of a castle wall yelling "It's not a question of where it grips it! It's a simple matter of power to weight ratios!"
392: does anyone know if you can get the ngram data, rather than the picture. I'd sure like to normalize that to something (other than the corpus total).
394: that's plausible, but doesn't really answer the question. Were there not dinosaur toys in the early 1970s? What caused the 1980s explosion?
Beware corpus effects with the n-gram viewer.
397: there's a link at the bottom of the page.
Right, that's not what I meant, but thanks. I don't want to download the corpus, I want to download the returns. Of course that's cause I'm lazy.
This is important. This means something.
398: Also:
Seen from this perspective, the Paleobiological Revolution, which occurred between 1970 and 1985, was a time when
"... paleobiologists self consciously worked to raise the status of their discipline, both by promoting the theoretical products of quantitative, theoretical paleontology, and by establishing new institutional and disciplinary footholds, including pedagogical reform and the establishment of new outlets for publication. From an intellectual perspective, the most spectacular example was Gould and Eldrege's "Punctuated equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism" (p. 35)."
Were there not dinosaur toys in the early 1970s?
I can assure you there were.
There were dinosaur toys, but not in ways we can understand today.
You know what the fellow said - in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo dinosaur clock.
The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful goddess, Art, will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo dinosaur, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!
I'm assuming Harri Lime had the blog killed. I apologize to everyone.
406: Except for dinosaurs like me, urple and bob.
This has all been footnotes to 114 for me.
Doesn't this new research suggest that birds aren't actually all that closely related to mammals?
One thing that's interesting: birds are crazy sensitive to airborne pollutants. (That's why canaries traditionally made such good companions in coalmines.) If dinosaurs had something close to bird lungs, that could easily be part of the explanation for why a global atmospheric event might have killed them off in much more significant numbers than other types of animals. (I'm sure there's actual science on this point.)
I think the reason canaries are used is because they are small and have fast metabolisms, so rises in poisonous gas levels effect them quickly.
Quick, someone gas an ostrich to check.
Right, but even big birds are very highly sensitive to airborne pollutants, compared to other animals, because of the way their lungs function.
Okay, you assholes, googling for support for 415, I run across this:
Birds didn't come from dinosaurs, study suggests
"For one thing, birds are found earÂliÂer in the fosÂsil recÂord than the diÂnoÂsaurs they are supÂposed to have deÂscended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretÂty seÂriÂous probÂlem, and there are othÂer inÂconÂsisÂtenÂcies with the bird-from-dinosaur theÂoÂries.
"But one of the priÂmaÂry reaÂsons many sciÂenÂtists kept pointÂing to birds as havÂing deÂscended from diÂnoÂsaurs was siÂmÂiÂlarÂiÂties in their lungs," Ruben said. "HowÂever, theÂroÂpod diÂnoÂsaurs had a movÂing feÂmur and thereÂfore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds."
There are some siÂmÂiÂlarÂiÂties beÂtween birds and diÂnoÂsaurs, so it is posÂsiÂble, the resÂearchers said, that birds and diÂnoÂsaurs shared a comÂmon anÂcesÂtor, such as the small, repÂtilÂiÂan "theÂcoÂdonts." These may then have evolved on sepÂaÂrate evÂoÂluÂtionÂary paths inÂto birds, crocodiles and diÂnoÂsaurs. The lung strucÂture and physÂiÂolÂoÂgy of crocodiles is much more like that of diÂnoÂsaurs than of birds, Ruben reÂmarked.
"It just seems pretÂty clear now that birds were evolvÂing all along on their own and did not deÂscend diÂrectly from the theÂroÂpod diÂnoÂsaurs, which lived many milÂlions of years latÂer," Quick said.
Now I'm just plain angry.
As recently as the mid 90s I was still being taught that the theropod-bird theory was one possible one, but not the only one and by no means the obviously correct one; the thecodont-bird theory also got an airing. Myself, I went for it, because the then current theropod theory involved fast-running creatures gradually developing wings to help them run, and this seemed to be contrary to my own experience with running birds, which don't tend to flap their wings for extra speed (and lose them when they stop flying, in the case of ostriches), while the thecodont theory involved a much more credible story about arboreal gliders.
Bird-From-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 9, 2010) -- A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight.
A new analysis was done of an unusual fossil specimen discovered in 2003 called "microraptor," in which three-dimensional models were used to study its possible flight potential, and it concluded this small, feathered species must have been a "glider" that came down from trees. The research is well done and consistent with a string of studies in recent years that pose increasing challenge to the birds-from-dinosaurs theory, said John Ruben, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University who authored a commentary in PNAS on the new research.
The weight of the evidence is now suggesting that not only did birds not descend from dinosaurs, Ruben said, but that some species now believed to be dinosaurs may have descended from birds.
"We're finally breaking out of the conventional wisdom of the last 20 years, which insisted that birds evolved from dinosaurs and that the debate is all over and done with," Ruben said. "This issue isn't resolved at all. There are just too many inconsistencies with the idea that birds had dinosaur ancestors, and this newest study adds to that."
Almost 20 years of research at OSU on the morphology of birds and dinosaurs, along with other studies and the newest PNAS research, Ruben said, are actually much more consistent with a different premise -- that birds may have had an ancient common ancestor with dinosaurs, but they evolved separately on their own path, and after millions of years of separate evolution birds also gave rise to the raptors. Small animals such as velociraptor that have generally been thought to be dinosaurs are more likely flightless birds, he said.
"Raptors look quite a bit like dinosaurs but they have much more in common with birds than they do with other theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus," Ruben said. "We think the evidence is finally showing that these animals which are usually considered dinosaurs were actually descended from birds, not the other way around."
Another study last year from Florida State University raised similar doubts, Ruben said.
In the newest PNAS study, scientists examined a remarkable fossil specimen that had feathers on all four limbs, somewhat resembling a bi-plane. Glide tests based on its structure concluded it would not have been practical for it to have flown from the ground up, but it could have glided from the trees down, somewhat like a modern-day flying squirrel. Many researchers have long believed that gliders such as this were the ancestors of modern birds.
"This model was not consistent with successful flight from the ground up, and that makes it pretty difficult to make a case for a ground-dwelling theropod dinosaur to have developed wings and flown away," Ruben said. "On the other hand, it would have been quite possible for birds to have evolved and then, at some point, have various species lose their flight capabilities and become ground-dwelling, flightless animals -- the raptors. This may be hugely upsetting to a lot of people, but it makes perfect sense."
In their own research, including one study just last year in the Journal of Morphology, OSU scientists found that the position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their ability to have adequate lung capacity for sustained long-distance flight, a fundamental aspect of bird biology. Theropod dinosaurs did not share this feature. Other morphological features have also been identified that are inconsistent with a bird-from-dinosaur theory. And perhaps most significant, birds were already found in the fossil record before the elaboration of the dinosaurs they supposedly descended from. That would be consistent with raptors descending from birds, Ruben said, but not the reverse.
So instead of birds being a particularly lame kind of dinosaur, it turns out that dinosaurs are an awesome kind of bird? I can live with that.
Wow, I thought the 'birds are a lineage of dinosaurs' thing was settled. Neat.
Not from you, beamish; you've been a voice of reason.
Given other experience with "bold group of researches challenges the scientific orthodoxy" news articles, I wouldn't be inclined to pay much attention unless someone who actually knows what they're talking about shows up in the comments here to tell us what the status is.
422: To be fair, both of those come from the same guy, Ruben.
concluded this small, feathered species must have been a "glider" that came down from trees
They laughed at me at the university! But WHO'S LAUGHING NOW? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
So instead of birds being a particularly lame kind of dinosaur, it turns out that dinosaurs are an awesome kind of bird?
Not all dinosaurs - just the small theropods. I don't think this means that Brachiosaurus is descended from birds.
424: Maybe we could find out directly by hitching a ride back in time on a neutrino.
Wouldn't that make either theropods not dinosaurs, or, conversely, birds still dinosaurs, just branching within the dinosaurs at some earlier point? If theropods come from birds, and birds aren't dinosaurs, and there are some dinosaurs that unambiguously don't come from birds, then theropods couldn't be dinosaurs, AFAICT.
The 418 guy is the same guy as 416, btw.
And speaking of Microraptor, it was the subject of a very recent short NYTimes piece in which Dr. Norell from the AMNH has this to say:
Though its anatomy is similar to that of birds, and some dinosaurs are considered ancestral to living birds, Dr. Norell said, Microraptor is thought to be a non-avian dinosaur in a group called dromaeosaurs that include Velociraptor. The size of a large pigeon, Microraptor had two sets of wings, one on its arms and the other on its legs.
There's a small group of people who don't believe that birds are theropod dinosaurs. The most well-known is Feduccia. My impression having been at a few public talks by young scientists is that we have to wait a few years for some people to die because they'll never change their minds.
The Wikipedia article on the temporal paradox (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox_(paleontology)) explains the mainstream refutation of one of the arguments in that article.
Anyway "birds aren't therapods" is clearly a fringe view, like humans are aquatic apes or other fringe views with a few scientists hanging on.
theropods not dinosaurs
That's the idea, yes. They're just a form of now exctinct, pre-historic bird.
I was about to mention Feduccia. This book looks interesting.
It sounds to me like it's now antiquated to use the word 'dinosaur' to refer to those big, lumbering, ferocious birds that ruled the earth long ago.
To be fair, both of those come from the same guy, Ruben.
You have the same guy talking to the press about them, but if I'm understanding correctly the studies themselves aren't both from him. He was involved with the first study (2009), but only "authored a commentary in PNAS on the [2010] research". And the research from FSU is something else entirely. And then you have Feduccia at UNC.
Feduccia at UNC.
Clearly the best of the bunch.
This all seems to be covered pretty well in the link from Berkeley that I posted way back in comment 201:
Other arguments [against the dinosaurian origin of birds], such as the putative differences between theropod and bird finger development, or lung morphology, or ankle bone morphology, all stumble on the lack of relevant data on extinct theropods, misinterpretations of anatomy, simplifying assumptions about developmental flexibility, and/or speculations about convergence, biomechanics, or selective pressures. The opponents of the theropod hypothesis refuse to propose an alternative hypothesis that is falsifiable. This is probably because there are no other suitable candidates for avian ancestors. "Thecodonts" are often promoted as such, but this is an obfuscatory, antiquated term for a hodgepodge of poorly understood and paraphyletic, undiagnosible reptiles. The problems cited by such opponents for theropods are often more serious for the "thecodont" pseudo-hypothesis. Finally, such opponents also refuse to use the methods and evidence normally accepted by comparative evolutionary biologists, such as phylogenetic systematics and parsimony. They rely more on an "intuitive approach," which is not a method at all but just an untestable gestalt impression laden with assumptions about how evolution must work.
The "controversy" remains an interest more of the press than the general scientific community. There are more interesting issues for scientists to explore, such as how flight performance changed in birds, what the earliest function(s) of feathers was(were), when endothermy arose in some archosaurs, which group of theropods was ancestral to birds, how theropod ecology changed with the acquisition of flight, why some bird groups survived the Cretaceous extinction of other dinosaurs, etc.
I was wondering how long it was going to take Urple to discover and start desperately citing to the BAND cranks.
Bird lungs are amazing, objectively excellent. Between those and the ability to photosynthesize, it's a tossup which improvement I'd like to engineer into my clone.
If theropods come from birds, and birds aren't dinosaurs, and there are some dinosaurs that unambiguously don't come from birds, then theropods couldn't be dinosaurs, AFAICT.
Yes, if the term "dinosaur" was limited to referring to a clade.
Whoever wrote that page at Berkeley really does seem to be unfairly dismissive. The article linked below seems more fair, presenting the arguments on both sides, while acknowledging that most paleontologists think birds probably are dinosaurs (but that's "most", and "probably", not "clearly"):
Are birds dinosaurs? New evidence muddies the picture
Note that this was written before the 2010 study.
440: indeed. Countercurrent gas exchangers! What a stroke of genius.
I can hardly believe this is still going on.
I was just about to write 445. Didn't this start off as a sex thread?
The first mention of dinosaurs on this thread was a full week ago!
Are you performing "blog policing"?
Debate settled: "Friday's for inventing sea beasts and birds, and Saturday's for inventing animals and dinosaurs and humans! Sunday's for chillaxin'."
Actually, I rather like dinosaurs.
Here's a quick refutation of the "bird lungs demonstrate that birds are not dinosaurs" argument.
Or, to excerpt:
What makes this research particularly grating is that, like all the other papers by Ruben, Feduccia, Martin and colleagues, the 'birds are not dinosaurs' movement relies on two under-handed tricks that should be exposed.
Firstly, the papers never really demonstrate anything, but merely try to shoot holes in a given line of supporting evidence. So...-- respiratory turbinates supposedly falsify dinosaur endothermy (Ruben et al. 1996), even though it's never been demonstrated that respiratory turbinates really are a requirement for any given physiological regime, and even though there are endotherms that lack respiratory turbinates-- the innards of Sinosauropteryx and Scipionyx supposedly falsify avian-like air-sac systems in non-avian coelurosaurs and demonstrate a croc-like hepatic piston diaphragm (Ruben et al. 1997, 1999), even though a gigantic dose of personal interpretation is required to accept that this claim might be correct, even though crocodilians and dinosaurs are fundamentally different in pelvic anatomy, and even though some living birds have the key soft-tissue traits reported by Ruben et al. in Sinosauropteryx and Scipionyx yet still have an avian respiratory system [alleged diaphragm of Sinosauropteryx highlighted in adjacent image; unconvincing on all levels]-- the weird leg proportions of birds supposedly falsify the classification of indisputably feathered Caudipteryx as non-avian (Jones et al. 2000), even though there is overlap between birds and non-birds in these data, and even though most of the data is screwy or suspect anyway (Christiansen & Bonde 2002, Dyke & Norell 2005)... and so on.Secondly, the papers either practise extremely selective citation, or fail to cite or mention stuff that contradicts what they say. One example: the size and shape of the sternal plates in non-avian coelurosaurs might have important implications for the respiratory physiology used by these animals (read on), yet Ruben and colleagues have repeatedly shown a schematic and incorrect diagram that shows the maniraptoran sternum to be a tiny little blob located along the ventral midline. In fact, the sternum was a gigantic plate (or two gigantic plates), similar to that of birds. In the new paper, Quick & Ruben (2009) figure a dinosaur skeletal reconstruction from 1916, which seems bizarre given that this is now substantially inaccurate in ways that are potentially important to the strength of their case (read on for more on this) [here's the actual reconstruction that Quick & Ruben (2009) use: that's right, Osborn's Tyrannosaurus from 1916, with three fingers and everything].
I'm pretty sure bats are bugs.
I don't quite understand why creationists are supposedly so supportive of the BAND crowd. (Of which I am now proudly an unoffical member. I wish there were t-shirts.) This is alleged in the link in 452 and in other websites I've seen criticizing them, as if they were all closet creationists (or at the very least, willing creationist-enablers). Whereas Feduccia, for one, throws up the opposite argument--if we're worried about what the creationists think, we shouldn't claim birds are dinosaurs based on weak evolutionary evidence, because that gives creationists one more something to object to. So, he's clearly not in the creationist camp.
The fact that birds are not dinosaurs doesn't mean that they didn't evolve. It just means that birds and dinosaurs evolved separately. Neither option involves non-evolution.
I think the idea is that both the existence of crank evolutionary arguments (I can't judge myself, but say, arguendo, that the birds-aren't-dinosaurs crowd are cranks) and the accusations that Big Dinosaur is unfairly and unscientifically refusing to listen to the birds-aren't-dinosaurs crowd grant aid and comfort to the creationists, because they make evolutionary biology look unreliable and politicized. I think this is probably true, but not something anyone involved in the controversy should be shaping their conduct to avoid: the argument's worth having on its own merits (or not) and the fact that creationists may distort it for political ends isn't something that can be easily avoided.
accusations that Big Dinosaur is unfairly and unscientifically refusing to listen to the birds-aren't-dinosaurs crowd
There's tons of vitriol coming at them from the other side, but, on a moderate amount of googling, I haven't seen any accusations like that being made by anyone in the band crowd. The closest I've seen is this, from Ruben: "Frankly, there's a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions." But that statement was made in a 'consensus can be slow to change, and these are new results' sort of context, not a 'we're being unfairly ignored' context. Obviously, their results are being published.
Creationists really like taking quotes out of context. So even if the BAND crowd isn't saying exactly that, creationists are still good at finding quotes that make it look like they're saying that.
Okay, on further googling (and general experience), I do agree that quite a lot of creationists seem to like to form arguments of the structure: "Some evolutionists disagree with one another about various aspects of evolutionary history. Therefore: evolution is false."
But to use the existence of creationists making arguments of that sort as even mildly a reason that other evolutionists should not disagree with you seems highly problematic, to say the least.
a reason that other evolutionists scientists should not disagree
Sorry, reading too many creationist websites...
urple I think you need to find another scientific lost cause to champion. There's this guy Bem at Cornell who's done really interesting work "proving" the existence of ESP.
urple I think you need to find another scientific lost cause to champion.
I don't see why; he seems to be getting rather a lot of mileage out of this one.
The Riemann Zeta function is very interesting, and/but brings out lots of latent cranks.
If you're going for novelty value, consider density functional theory as a yet-to-be implemented analytical approach to an all-encompassing many body theory.
Sifu, do you know something about this controversy that goes beyond the information in the links that have been posted in this thread? If so, please do share it. If not, 462 is pretty insulting.
This is another good overall summary of the dispute. Although, again, even though it's relatively recent, it doesn't seem to account for the few most recent studies published by the BAND camp (2009/2010).
I do admit that the number of creationists who approvingly cite the BAND results as if they demonstrated something in support of creationism is unnerving. It makes it hard even to wade through google seraches for interesting results. I assume that probably something do with google's pagerank algorithms, which are being thrown off by the fact creationists vastly outnumber paleontologists on the internet.
Birds are not dinosaurs in the popular sense of supposedly being the descendents of theropod dinosaurs. Birds and dinosaurs are related, but only indirectly in having remote distant common ancestors that were arboreal. Because no dinosaurs have been regarded as being able to climb, birds may or may not be considered as true dinosaurs depending on the definition of the Dinosauria and whether or not it is a natural monophyletic group. If not, then birds should not be considered as actual dinosaurs, but instead as their own separate lineage. Exactly when the first true birds developed the ability to fly remains unknown, but structurally it occurred between the development of Scansoriopteryx and Archaeopteryx.
I just had a few minutes of panic where I thought dinosaur-museum.org might be some creationist pseudo-science decoy, but it appears to be legitimate.
Urpie, you are winning this war. Don't stop commenting now.
This blog appears to be written by someone who sure knows a hell of a lot about this topic--I'm guessing either a professional paleontolgist, or at least someone who studied it seriously. (There is no info on the bio page, so I don't know for sure.) He runs through the controversy and is clearly on the side of "birds are probably dinosaurs", but doesn't dismiss the BAND theorists as cranks.
I'm actually still not quite sure where all the energetic vitriol for the BAND camp is coming from.
465: why would it be insulting? Daryl Bem is a renowned psychologist who publishes papers on ESP in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. The vast majority of people in his field think he's entirely wrong, but it's not like he's just some guy writing random crap on the internet. As best I can tell from the quotes that have been published here (and the sourcing of the links) that appears to be exactly the situation with the BAND people you're championing.
I just had a few minutes of panic where I thought dinosaur-museum.org might be some creationist pseudo-science decoy, but it appears to be legitimate.
Indeed, it appears to be the website of the Blanding Dinosaur Museum, which is definitely legitimate.
471: I'm pretty sure this is the 'polite scientific discourse' way of dismissing them as cranks.
I swore to myself last night I wasn't going to let this damn thread distract for another day. I'm disappointed in myself. We're spinning in circles, but 298 still seems to be the right approach. Unless someone turns up something that convinces me otherwise, that's going to remain my conclusion.
And the link in 471 comes pretty close to politely saying "crank" too:
Take, for instance, Dr. Larry Martin. Dr. Martin has made contributions in fields as varied as paleoclimate, evolutionary biology and epidemiology. As modern scientists become more and more specialized, Dr. Martin is as close to a gentleman naturalist as one is bound to meet in the 21st century. However, since the 1980s Dr. Martin's publications have repeatedly returned to the argument that birds are not dinosaurs. His evidence has varied, but his conclusion has not.
That's someone being snarky.
Fine, 471 retracted. I direct your attention back to 468.
So, yeah, the guy in 471 is just polite vitriol, instead of openly hostile vitriol.
479: I'm not getting your point about vitriol: it seems as if you're seeing any response to the BAND camp as either supportive or discrediting. Either it treats them respectfully, so they're not cranks, or it treats them disrespectfully, so the responder is unreliable because emotionally invested/unbalanced, or it's politely snarky, which is also discreditingly vitriolic.
I'd take the polite snarkiness as the only workable way of conveying: "These people have real credentials, so they have to be responded to, but their arguments are reliably weak and there's no way to convince them of anything."
This is a pretty good discussion of the BAND issue that's reasonably free of name-calling. (That blog in general is excellent, btw.)
As best I can tell from the quotes that have been published here (and the sourcing of the links) that appears to be exactly the situation with the BAND people you're championing.
But I'm championing them out of pre-existing allegiance with their conclusions. I don't know enough about the science to say one way or the other. The fact that most paleontologists disagree with them is meaningful. The fact that most paleontologists (who write things online) are hostile in that disagreement is odd.
Do you actually have an opinion about the science? (I don't as science. I'm anti-BANDit on writing style at this point) 298 is a statement of preference about word usage, not about what evolved from what -- I thought 'don't call it a dinosaur unless it's extinct' was what you were committed to, not 'birds don't evolutionarily belong within the dinosaurs, they branched off from a common ancestor'.
And the hostility is perfectly easy to understand: there's not much that's more annoying than someone who's disagreeing with you in your area of expertise based on what look to you like shoddy arguments and bad evidence.
481: I'm not suggesting that vitriol makes the anti-BANDers wrong, just that I don't have a good sense of what's animating it. I guess they're just frustrating with dealing with them.
But I'm championing them out of pre-existing allegiance with their conclusions. I don't know enough about the science to say one way or the other. The fact that most paleontologists disagree with them is meaningful. The fact that most paleontologists (who write things online) are hostile in that disagreement is odd.
The hostility is because most working paleontologists believe that the BANDits are manipulating or fudging evidence in support of a pre-existing allegiance with the conclusion that birds are not dinosaurs. The link in Teo's piece in 482, or the thing I linked above, explain why.
Do you actually have an opinion about the science? ... 298 is a statement of preference about word usage, not about what evolved from what -- I thought 'don't call it a dinosaur unless it's extinct' was what you were committed to, not 'birds don't evolutionarily belong within the dinosaurs, they branched off from a common ancestor'.
I'm not committed to any scientific conclusion, if that's what you're asking. I went through most of this conversation completely unaware that "are birds direct descendants of dinosaurs?" was even an open topic of scientific debate. I thought it had been pretty well settled. So, my conclusions aren't dependant on science. But they could be supported by science, if the BANDers eventually win the argument.
"Urple's got an agenda," Dr. Longrich, 35, said in an interview. "He has this hit list of modern-day dinosaurs that he's trying to get rid of."
Even here in this thread, my first few links were dismissed as coming from "the same person". A lone crank. But, no, actually, they were discussing the work of several different people at several different universities. Okay, well they're all cranks, was the response. Here are links from lots of people who hate them, demonstrating as much. Okay, I agree, those people don't like them, maybe their work is shoddy. But, wait, these other people seem to know what they're talking about, and are taking their arguments more seriously. Are we sure they're really cranks? Maybe those people are just being overly polite. I don't know. That seems to be the case. And now I've spend another full fucking day learning about dinosaurs.
Are we sure they're really cranks?
No one here (as far as I know) is a Ph.D. level paleontologist. But the broad and deep consensus among degreed paleontologists seems to be that yes, indeed, these people are doing terrible science in support of a predisposed conclusion, and are worthy of (generally pretty dismissive) refutation. I think that's a decent working definition of a "crank."
The hostility is because most working paleontologists believe that the BANDits are manipulating or fudging evidence in support of a pre-existing allegiance with the conclusion that birds are not dinosaurs.
What I haven't seen in any of these links is even an attempt at an explanation for why these scientists would have a preexisting allegiance with the conclusion that birds are not dinosaurs.
It's not like the global warming skeptics who are funded by Exxon.
(Or, wait, creationist organizations aren't funding grants for these people, are they?)
492: you don't have an intuitive sense for why that might be the case?
I mean, I agree they're probably doing shoddy science. Based on the limited amount I've read.
Here is a comment from teo's link:
Feduccia is by no means completely stupid - his ideas on the origin of flight and the evolution of modern birds are spot on - but sometimes he can get too personal when arguing that birds aren't dinosaurs.
Mike Taylor agrees with me in full on the question of nomenclature:
Question Assuming for the moment that we accept birds as descendents of small theropod dinosaurs, then is it correct to say that birds are dinosaurs? If we say that, won't we confuse laymen?Answer
History
This issue is clouded by the fact that the meaning of the word ``dinosaur'' has changed over time - which may or may not be a good thing.
When the first dinosaurs were discovered, it never crossed anyone's mind for a moment that they might be ancestral to birds, so the original definition of ``dinosaur'' certainly didn't include them. Even with the discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1861, the dinosaur origin of birds was far from being accepted as fact. It's only really since Ostrom demonstrated the similarities between Archaeopteryx and Deinonychus in the late 60s that the theory has gained any respectability - and so, the idea that the dinosaurs even might include birds dates back only a few decades.
Since then, a fundamental shift in nomenclature practices has meant that this bird-inclusive definition of the Dinosauria is now accepted as orthodox. This shift has been towards a viewpoint often called the ``cladistic'' view (related to, but separate from, the issue of cladistic analysis), which is that the only groupings which may validly by given names are monophyletic ones - that is, those consisting of a single animal together with all of its ancestors.
This spells trouble for the old definition of the Dinosauria, which is essentially the common ancestor of the Saurischia and Ornithischia with all of its descendants except the birds. Such a grouping is described as paraphyletic and is considered by cladists to be an unnatural group. So as cladistic nomenclature has taken hold, so the newer, monophyletic and more inclusive definition of the Dinosauria has become accepted.
Is this change a good thing? Yes, because it means that Dinosauria are now defined in a way that's in keeping with widespread taxonomic practice. And no, because the change itself is disruptive, leaving what was once a clear meaning unclear. A similar situation has arisen with regard to the class Reptilia, which is considered to include the dinosaurs and hence also the birds. (So, yes, birds are reptiles!)
Some people, notably Ken Kinman, argue that it would have been better to make up completely new names for the inclusive monophyletic groups rather than re-assigning the old names. In his paper Origin of Birds: The Final Solution? (American Zoologist: Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 504-512), Peter Dodson is particularly forthright:
For example, the word dinosaur was not previously problematic - it was universally understood. Within cladistics it has now been redefined to include birds [...] and then a new and cumbersome phrase, non-avian dinosaur, has been substituted. This is not progress; this is semantic obfuscation not enlightened communication.
In the alternative approach, the monophyletic group consisting of all dinosaurs including birds could have been given a new name - Eudinosauria, say - and reptiles including dinosaurs and birds given a new name such as Eureptilia. Whether or not this would have been a good idea, it seems that the moment has passed: it's not going to happen.So are birds dinosaurs or not?
With all that said, I'm still going to continue hedging, because there is a big difference between technical nomenclature and everyday language. When we talk to non-scientists, they will understand the term ``dinosaur'' to include the likes of T. rex and Triceratops but not swans and sparrows. OK then, there's no need to rock that boat - let's use the word in accordance with people's expectations - in everyday life, ``dinosaurs'' generally means ``non-avian dinosaurs'' - or what I like to think of as ``Real Dinosaurs'' :-)
More than that, most of the time scientists also use the word ``dinosaur'' in the informal sense that excludes birds. For example, the Dinosaur Mailing List's administrative message describes the list's purpose as ``to give people a forum for the scientific discussion of dinosaurs.'' Yet everyone implicitly understands that this means non-avian dinosaurs: the list only ever discusses birds in as much as they are relevant to Real Dinosaurs.
So even scientists don't need scientific nomenclature all the time. Generally, though, the feeling is that it is better to stick with formal nomenclature for most technical discussion; and certainly in formal publications, in which misunderstanding would be disastrous.
As a rough rule of thumb, when people use latinate terms like Dinosauria and Reptilia, they often intend them to be understood in the monophyletic, inclusive sense; whereas informal terms such as ``dinosaurs'' and ``reptiles'' tend to carry their historical meanings. But this is by no means hard and fast.
In many technical contexts, the informal notion of Real Dinosaurs simply isn't rigorous enough for many uses. When an author wants to refer to dinosaurs other than birds, exactly which animals does she with to exclude? All of the Aves? Just the extant groups? The whole of the Avialae, or even all the Maniraptora? Or just the Pygostylia? In many contexts, it's necessary use an unambiguously precise term such as ``non-avialan Dinosauria''.
But we shouldn't allow that to blind us to the obvious - so that when we read that Spielberg is making a film about dinosaurs, we can be pretty sure it's not going to Sparrow Park.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
We're witnessing the creation of some kind of crazed masterpiece, aren't we? I stand in awe. Sort of.
Is 499 to 497? The formatting got screwed up, but 497 is basically a long block quote. I didn't add anything.
497 is good. This is a classification question, so is there really an 'objective' right answer or just a bunch of querolous classifiers arguing about the neatest way to draw their boxes?
I have spent hours on Unfogged defending the leadership qualities of Chairman Mao and the validity of group selection, so while I have great admiration for Urple's effort here (though I am not motivated to join it).
Dinosaurs: Terror Bird Fought Like Muhammad Ali. (Video link.)
New research reveals that terror birds - large, prehistoric carnivores that evolved alongside dinosaurs - hunted their prey with quick, opportunistic strikes. Trace Dominguez reports.
499 was a response to the edifice you've constructed, an edifice, comprised of links about dinosaurs, that will stand as long as the internet does. Think about it, man: posterity is yours.
497 succinctly covers my position; thank you for finding it urple. And as illustration, people like Norell use language* in just that way: Though its anatomy is similar to that of birds, and some dinosaurs are considered ancestral to living birds, Dr. Norell said, Microraptor is thought to be a non-avian dinosaur in a group called dromaeosaurs that include Velociraptor.
Or the AMNH text in 325: Some dinosaurs, such as the Barosaurus, were quite large and may have weighed as much as 35 tons. But other dinosaurs, such as Compsognathus, were about the size of a chicken and weighed only eight pounds.
*Allowing that the NYTimes reporter may have completely bungled his meaning.
We started on this road with a bunch of Yalies pleading for 'their' dinosaur bird.
Those scientists need to stop talking down to us as if we can't handle the truth. "Some dinosaurs, such as the Barosaurus, were quite large and may have weighed as much as 35 tons. But other dinosaurs, such as the chicken, weigh only eight pounds."
The article in 506 has to be read to be appreciated. (To appreciate how profoundly it supports 497, I mean.) I'm restraining myself from blockquoting the whole thing, because I think I've done that enough.
On LB's comment:
And the hostility is perfectly easy to understand: there's not much that's more annoying than someone who's disagreeing with you in your area of expertise based on what look to you like shoddy arguments and bad evidence.
My impression is that scientific arguments are like all other human arguments: everyone who disagrees with you is by definition a crank. For example, after his recent heresy on kin selection, E. O. Wilson has been accused of abandoning science more often than Obama gets called a socialist. In the big physics fights about string theory a couple of years ago, everyone called everyone else a crank.
So urple has settled this question. Let's move onto the next one. Tomatoes are clearly a vegetable and not a fruit, right?
This is now a running joke in my family, since my wife is in thrall with Big Biology, and I'm the only clear-headed thinker in the house. My daughter loves to play 20 Questions, but she's always specifies when she asks if it's a fruit if it's under Daddy's definition, or Mommy's.
The younger boy loves to play 20 Questions, but, after seeing a few grizzlies in Glacier two summers ago, that's what he always chooses.
Speaking of grizzlies, I just finished the first part of Coming into the Country. I like the line about how journeying into the Alaska wilderness is statistically safer than living in New Jersey.
And speaking yet more of grizzlies, I call upon my right thinking friends to forswear and resist the Badger Menace come Thursday, and, should right prevail, and, coincidently, Harvard prevail in the first round, make the proper affiliation in the weekend round.
What makes Urple's argument so goddamn infuriating is that he keeps ignoring the key point: no one has ever disputed (a) that there is a core meaning of "dinosaur" that refers to now extinct, Mezosoic fauna. There's no problem with maintaining that linguistic usage. That doesn't mean that (b) "birds are not dinosaurs" -- to our current knowledge, they are, unless you insist stupidly on a definition of a "dinosaur" that by fiat excludes birds. Urple keeps acting as if (a) necessarily implies (b), which is nonsense.
513: there are fewer bears in the rest of it, but I think the latter two parts are more interesting (the first part just mostly made me want to go canoeing north of the arctic circle, which I'm pretty sure is something I actually do not want to do).
So it turns out that if you mistakenly take BAND to be an acronym that's actually used in the Great Bird/Dinosaur Debates (outside of this blog, that is), and then you try googling it with various qualifying search terms, you just get a bunch of musical acts with names such as Evolution and Dinosaur Jr and The Birds.
But then after four or five tries, you realize you're a total doop.
So it turns out that if you mistakenly take BAND to be an acronym that's actually used in the Great Bird/Dinosaur Debates
It is! Just an ungoogleable one, as it turns out. One way of googling it.
What makes Urple's argument so goddamn infuriating is that he keeps ignoring the key point: no one has ever disputed (a) that there is a core meaning of "dinosaur" that refers to now extinct, Mezosoic fauna. There's no problem with maintaining that linguistic usage. That doesn't mean that (b) "birds are not dinosaurs" -- to our current knowledge, they are, unless you insist stupidly on a definition of a "dinosaur" that by fiat excludes birds. Urple keeps acting as if (a) necessarily implies (b), which is nonsense.
But (a) does imply (b), at least using the "core meaning of dinosaur". That's why I offered a compromise in which I would agree that even though birds are not dinosaurs, as that term is properly understood, they are Dinosauria. But you rejected that compromise.
as that term is properly commonly, albeit inaccurately understood
Prescriptivist! It's a word. The commonly understood meaning is the fucking meaning. A word may also have other, technical meanings, but in this case, as 497 explains, actually, it doesn't, really: most professionals commonly use the word in its informal sense (see, e.g., 506), and use other words (such as "dinosauria") when talking in technical terms.
No, you really don't get it. It's true that the word has a core meaning, but what science has revealed in the past 20 or so years is that even using that core meaning birds are really dinosaurs. So we can say "dinosaur" and have our core impression be the extinct megafauna, but the whole point of the most recent science is that "birds" are really just properly understood as a subset of the same animals (e.g., Velociraptor) that even laymen have been walking around calling dinosaurs for years.
UPETGI's example above should have settled it: an ant is not the first thing that comes to mind when you say "animal" but no one would dispute, even in a nontechnical sense, that an ant is an animal.
Halford, it sounds like you are in fact disputing that there is a core meaning of "dinosaur" that refers to now extinct, Mesozoic fauna. Because using that core meaning, birds aren't dinosaurs, they're the direct evolutionary descendants of (a subset of the) dinosaurs. Which is what I said all along. Unless you're claiming that birds are extinct.
462 There's this guy Bem at Cornell who's done really interesting work "proving" the existence of ESP.
Didn't we already have dsquared defending that?
(Asssuming ad arguendo that birds evolved from dinosaurs at all, which as we've already already covered, is subject to at least some dispute. But I'm willing to treat it as a given.)
527: did we really? Oh d^2 you little minx.
there are fewer bears in the rest of it
But not none! In the first few pages of the second part they see some bears on the ground while they're flying around in a helicopter looking for a place to put the new capital.
I think the first part is actually going to turn out to be the most relevant for me professionally, but I'll wait and see how the others go.
Again, it's not just that birds evolved from dinosaurs. It's that the difference between a magpie and a velociraptor is about the same as a difference between a velociraptor and an apatosaurus -- they are all part of the same group. The layman's term "dinosaur" covers both. It's perfectly true that when we hear someone say "Jurassic Park is about dinosaurs" we don't need to think that it's about chickens, but it's rank stupidity to say that this implies that "birds are not dinosaurs" -- we now know that they are, just a version of dinosaur that is common enough in daily life and human history that we generally use the specific word "bird" to refer to them.
I think the current urple-Halford dispute centers on whether the core meaning of "dinosaur" includes "extinct" as an essential attribute.
Maybe, but we now know enough to say that one type of the animal that people commonly call "dinosaurs" did not go extinct, namely the kind of animals that have typically been called birds by laymen in English. That's actually new and interesting and totally non-technical knowledge, and it's just wrong to assert that it's not the case, even if we understand that when one is referring to birds one uses the more specific word "bird" and not the more general word "dinosaur."
510 In the big physics fights about string theory a couple of years ago, everyone called everyone else a crank.
The trouble with this is that the "big physics fights" were basically confined to blogs and four out of five blogs are written by cranks, no matter which side they're on.
Of course, the correct opinion about string theory is mine. But not everyone who disagrees is a crank; some of them are confused and will eventually figure it out, some of them are too ignorant to know better and that's okay because it's not close enough to their field, and some of them are just dumb.
This thread is the best. The Supreme Court has your back, urple.
533: Thank you, teo, for putting that so succinctly.
I was remembering this thread and misrepresenting dsquared's point, which was more along the lines of "but consciousness isn't understood so it must be magic and unicorns!"
Halford, your case seems to rest on the idea that there are a bunch of birds that lay people call "dinosaurs". I don't think there are. Velociraptors aren't birds. Microraptors may be birds (probably are?), or they may be dinosaurs. I don't know enough about them to say. My point is simple: birds evolved from dinosaurs. Prehistoric birds were around at the K-T event. Some of those birds survived the K-T event. (Most didn't.) No dinosaurs survived.
535: yeah. And of course, in the Bem and E.O. Wilson situations, you have the classic "old, well-respected scientist gets a little bit nuts and starts saying wacky things" scenario (c.f. the more-unfortunate Watson, Jim). I can certainly think of people in my field who are respected for work they did decades ago but privately widely agreed to be basically loons who should really not be engaged with.
Is there such a thing as a thread extinction event? Because, neat.
Tell me, essear, is string theory physics?
your case seems to rest on the idea that there are a bunch of birds that lay people call "dinosaurs".
No, not at all. Rather, it's that birds are basically a subset of the animals that lay people have for years been calling dinosaurs, not a meaningfully distinct entity. It's true that this shakes up the early 1970s conception of the dinosaurs that a lot of people have, but it's also clearly right and totally non-technical.
I agree, Halford, but the Senate Judiciary Committee is going to have some veeeeeery serious questions for you about stare decisis.
it's that birds are basically a subset of the animals that lay people have for years been calling dinosaurs
But this is plainly untrue! Unless you mean something very hand-wavy by "basically". As you acknoweldge, the core meaning of "dinosaur" refers to now extinct, Mesozoic fauna.
No, I mean that the birds are a subset of a particular kind of animal, the dinosaur, most of which went extinct, but some of which, namely the birds, did not. It's perfectly fine to think of the primary referent of "dinosaur" being the large extinct creatures; what's affirmatively wrong is to think that they meaningfully have more in common with each other than they do with birds, or that all of the dinosaurs became extinct, because they didn't.
Fruit: it's what's for dessert.
the primary referent of "dinosaur" being the large extinct creatures;
No one said anything about dinosaurs only being the large creatures. My 1972 book has a nice Q&A on whether all dinosaurs were large; the answer is an emphatic 'no.'
Are regular old reptiles dinosaurs? Like alligators and snakes?
Of all the reptiles alive today, crocodiles and alligators may be the least changed from their prehistoric ancestors of the late Cretaceous period, over 65 million years ago--although the even earlier crocodiles of the Triassic and Jurassic periods sported some distinctly un-crocodile-like features, such as bipedal postures and vegetarian diets.
Bipedal crocodiles!
they meaningfully have more in common with each other than they do with birds
But they do, right? For instance, they appear together in a book that urple reads to his kids.
I mean, I don't think anyone in this discussion really misunderstands each other. And basically all language consists of ill-defined groupings put together for mutual convenience. For most people, it's more useful to refer to the non-avian dinosaurs than to include birds. I kind of think the broader, more cladistically correct definition of "dinosaur" should be cause to coin a new word.
Dinosaurs split off early from the crocodile family tree, paleontologists suggested Wednesday, based on the discovery of a 240-million-year-old fossil "archosaur."
So it's not so much that birds are dinosaurs, as that crocodiles, alligators, and birds are all archosaurs.
I mean that the birds are a subset of a particular kind of animal, the dinosaur, most of which went extinct, but some of which, namely the birds, did not.
This sentence is either gibberish or highly pedantic, depending on how it's understood, but could be made perfectly comprehensible if re-written as follows: "I mean that Aves, the class of animals that includes modern birds, are a subset of a particular kind of animal, the taxon Dinosauria, most of which went extinct, but some of which, namely the Aves, did not."
(That's an incredibly stilted sentence, but that's only because I followed your format as closely as possible. It could be rewritten to be more comprehensible.)
For instance, the colloquial use of "dinosaur" to mean "something or someone obsolete or clinging to old-fashioned ways" kind of hinges on a parallel to a definition that definitely doesn't include birds.
I call out-dated old fogeys "archosaurs", because it's really more apt.
Similarly, I don't think anything that's bipedal and vegetarian deserves to be called a "crocodile". They're lucky we're even willing to call them "crocodialian".
"I mean that Aves, the class of animals that includes modern birds, are a subset of a particular kind of animal, the taxon Dinosauria, most of which went extinct, but some of which, namely the Aves, did not."
You've written that pedantically, but there's no reason why it needs to be so pedantic. The taxon Dinosauria is most of what we mean by "dinosaurs" and I dispute strongly that this is somehow some ubertechnical information that only initiates can understand. If you'd stop being such a cheapskate and buy your kids a book written after 1972, they'd be happy to understand that birds are also a kind of dinosaur, albeit one that we refer to with the common name "bird."
Again, no one has an issue with "since most people refer specifically to birds when talking about birds, you can probably assume that when I say the word 'dinosaur' in lay parlance that I'm referring to the extinct Mesozoic animals." It's the "birds are not dinosaurs" that's the problem -- we now know that this is wrong, even for what lay people understand are dinosaurs. If apatosaurs and velociraptors are both dinosaurs, then birds are too.
The lesson here is that ungulatologists made the REALLY REALLY RIGHT DECISION. They realized that whales share a common ancestor with Artiodactyla [pigs, goats, camel, deer, cattle]. Instead of simply saying "Guess what, guys! Whales are even-toed ungulates! Isn't that interesting and totally non-technical!" they created a new unnecessary category called "Cetartiodactyla" just so that there would be a clade containing separate "Cetacea" and "Artiodactyla" branches and nothing else.
I don't think so. The colloquial use of "camel" to mean "something that can survive a long time without water" kind of hinges on a parallel to a definition that definitely doesn't include whales.
I, for one, welcome our new bipedal vegetarian crocodile overlords.
Since we're aquatic apes and whales are aquatic camels, then by the principle of something something something, we bear the same relation to whales as apes do to camels, which is.....shit, heebie, make your students write an essay about this.
Sounds like Ned's reading a kid's camel book from 1972.
For instance, the colloquial use of "dinosaur" to mean "something or someone obsolete or clinging to old-fashioned ways" kind of hinges on a parallel to a definition that definitely doesn't include birds.
Now the metaphorical sentence in question ["Man is a wolf [sc. to man]"] will not convey its intended meaning to a reader sufficiently ignorant about wolves. What is needed is not so much that the reader shall know the standard dictionary meaning of "wolf"—or be able to use that word in literal senses—as that he shall know what I will call the system of associated commonplaces. Imagine some layman required to say, without taking special thought, those things he held to be true about wolves; the set of statements resulting would approximate to what I am here calling the system of commonplaces associated with the word "wolf". I am assuming that in any given culture the responses made by different persons to the test suggested would agree rather closely, and that even the occasional expert, who might have unusual knowledge of the subject, would still know "what the man in the street thinks about the matter". From the expert's standpoint, the system of commonplaces may include half-truths or downright mistakes (as when a whale is classified as a fish); but the important thing for the metaphor's effectiveness is not that the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should be readily and freely evoked.
For present purposes Black's point might have been even better put with reference to the claim "men are pigs", whose force is not diminished even when we know that pigs are clean and clever.
Also, when did we start calling plant-eating crocodilians "vegetarian"? Isn't the right word herbivore? They're not bipedal, vegetarian crocodiles; they're bipedal, herbivorous crocodilians.
What Halford's saying is that just as whales are mammals, even in the colloquial sense of "mammal", so birds are dinosaurs, even in the colloquial sense of "dinosaur". That's assuming, probably reasonably enough, that "dinosaur" is colloquially meant as a natural-kind term, with the speaker intending the term to apply to all and only members of a natural class, the true demarcating characteristics of which are open to discovery but which won't include the likes of being extinct.
On the other hand, if urple's wrong about this, I don't want to be right.
On the other hand, if urple's wrong about this, I don't want to be right.
If I'm wrong about this, then right and wrong are meaningless concepts.
When it's a lifestyle, it's "vegetarian". These were SCPL.
524: Prescriptivist! It's a word.
Words! Words! Words! We didn't need words -- we had dinosaurs!
as when a whale is classified as a fish
This whole thing reminds me a lot of the part in Moby Dick where he goes on and on about how wrong Linnaeus was to say whales aren't fish.
And now we'll never know what's really right.
After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses
Bowing to the competition online, the encyclopedia's publisher said the 2010 edition, a 32-volume set that weighs in at 129 pounds, would be the last.11th Edition 4Evah!
That's assuming, probably reasonably enough, that "dinosaur" is colloquially meant as a natural-kind term, with the speaker intending the term to apply to all and only members of a natural class
Frankly, I don't find this reasonable at all.
Actually, I use "dinosaur" synonymously with "bipedal vegetarians".
People talking as if "dinosaur" is, owing to its genealogy, some kind of intrinsically technical term should consider the history of the word "moron".
Actually I use "fixed gear" synonymously with "bipedal freewheel".
Are morons descended from dinosaurs?
Actually, I rather like commas.
Commas went extint millions of years ago JP.
Which is to say they lost their tint.
What Halford's saying is that just as whales are mammals, even in the colloquial sense of "mammal", so birds are dinosaurs, even in the colloquial sense of "dinosaur". That's assuming, probably reasonably enough, that "dinosaur" is colloquially meant as a natural-kind term, with the speaker intending the term to apply to all and only members of a natural class, the true demarcating characteristics of which are open to discovery but which won't include the likes of being extinct.
Sounds good to me. I'm not totally sure what a "natural-kind term" is or what a "natural class" is, and will let the philosophers fight that one out, but the analogy to the word "mammal" sounds right.
I certainly don't think the demarcating characteristic can be extinction -- if we found a live T-Rex in some hidden valley in the Andes, no one would hesitate to call it a dinosaur. Indeed, if we found some slightly evolved species that looked basically exactly like a T-Rex but was a little different, no one would have any problem calling that a "dinosaur." What the interesting recent science has taught us is that there's not much difference between that discovery and living birds -- or, again, that birds are closer to what were indisputably "dinosaurs" than many species that are indisputably "dinosaurs" are to each other.
I call them tailed periods.
I call them virgula suspensiva.
Man so now I totally want to write a horror movie called None Dare Call It Dinosaur.
588: I fucking resisted making that joke because I'm a fucking probationary adult and then you go and make it anyway.
592: Modern advances in stuffing technology.
593: Where's that fucking lurker tenured prof dude?
Me? I'm not a lurker. Or a dude.
if we found a live T-Rex in some hidden valley in the Andes, no one would hesitate to call it a dinosaur. Indeed, if we found some slightly evolved species that looked basically exactly like a T-Rex but was a little different, no one would have any problem calling that a "dinosaur."
This is a point I've made a half-dozen times, so I'm not sure if you think we're disagreeing on this.
What the interesting recent science has taught us is that there's not much difference between that discovery and living birds
Are you just trolling now? I honestly don't think you can seriously believe this. There's not much difference between (a) the discovery of a live T-Rex in some hidden valley in the Andes and (b) the fact that birds exist? Not much difference to who? Is there any person on the planet for whom this would be true?
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)
"The dinosaur heart was kept alive in a vat, in a laboratory, in a special solution."
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)
"We're already familiar with birds, so I don't know why anyone would be interested in this living T-Rex specimen. You've seen one Dinosauria, you've seen 'em all."
I assume that's probably not how you really meant that, but I'm having trouble parsing it for another meaning.
I mean, here's what I think I take your point to be: if no one anywhere had ever before seen a bird, and then we recently discovered all of them, knowing what we know now about paleotology, we'd all be perfectly comfortable calling these newly discovered creatures "dinosaurs". And: maybe! Maybe that's right. I don't really know. It's certainly a very ahistorical thought exercise, and I'm not sure what bearing it's supposed to have on reality.
I assume that's probably not how you really meant that, but I'm having trouble parsing it for another meaning.
My understanding of Halford's argument is that what he means is that the recent discovery that birds are dinosaurs is equivalent to discovering a living T-Rex somewhere, in that it means dinosaurs have existed alongside us the whole time but we just never realized it.
I'm having trouble parsing it for another meaning.
Now you're just being deliberately silly, or perhaps your brain has been eaten by a slug. There would be difference in the surprise factor, sure, between finding a live T-Rex descendant in the Andes and seeing a pigeon, because we're familiar with birds. But since a non-extinct T-Rex would clearly be a "dinosaur," it can't be the case that "extinct" is the delineating boundary of the category "dinosaur."
And, from a classification standpoint, it turns out there's not that much of a difference (assuming, that, just as birds have evolved you were looking at an evolved descendant of a T-Rex, not just some animal frozen in amber) in terms of an answer to the question "did dinosaurs go extinct." No, we now know, they didn't; the broader category dinosaur (which, again, is like the category mammal) included birds, if it is to mean anything at all, and birds survived.
You know what's really cool? That birds are reptiles.
There would be difference in the surprise factor, sure, between finding a live T-Rex descendant in the Andes and seeing a pigeon,
"A difference in the surprise factor"? Really? Would there be any other difference?
Another way to look at this would be that ever since dinosaurs were first discovered we've been trying to guess what they were like, and over time new information we've discovered has changed the nature of those guesses a lot and made the older ones look pretty silly. The discovery that birds are dinosaurs was a huge leap forward in this process, because it meant that not only did we learn something new about the classification of dinosaurs, we also suddenly knew a ton of very specific information about (one specialized group of) dinosaurs that could give us enormous insights into how to make better guesses about what extinct dinosaurs were like.
607 works even better if you replace "the discovery that birds are dinosaurs" with "the discovery that birds are direct evolutionary descendants of some subset of the dinosaurs (and so relatively closely related to many of them)". After all, again, it's not as if we discovered that the birds we see flying around today were also actually "dinosaurs" flying around the Mesozoic. Their prehistoric ancestors were flying around. (Or maybe not even yet really flying? Isn't that still sort of up in the air?) In this way birds are very unlike, say, cockroaches and scorpions, which I think basically were then as they now are.
609 -- similarly, saber-tooth tigers were not mammals. It's not like today's mammals were around in the ice age!
Of course they were mammals. And, they would be mammals even if a kid's book from 1972 said otherwise.
Some mammals, such as Megatherium, were quite large . But other mammals, such as Ophiomys parvus were about the size of a mouse.
They're spoon-feeding Casanova the boiled guts of dinosaurs
Then they'll torture him with self-confidence and poison him with words.
607 works even better if you replace "the discovery that birds are dinosaurs" with "the discovery that birds are direct evolutionary descendants of some subset of the dinosaurs (and so relatively closely related to many of them)"
Well, no, it's not as pithy, for one thing.
And for another, part of what I meant in 607 is that the realization was along the lines of "we've been trying to figure out what dinosaurs were like for ages, but it turns out they were all around us all along." It's not just that we knew more about them, we actually knew them, personally, and had known them forever. A lot of people thought and think that's amazingly cool, including Halford and UPETGI in this thread, and reinterpreting it such that birds aren't actually dinosaurs (even if you keep the relevation that they are descended from them) takes away a big part of the wonder there.
Note too that this is all on the emotional level, setting aside cladistics and the scientific issues in general. You clearly have your own emotional reasons for preferring a different interpretation, which is fine too.
And for another, part of what I meant in 607 is that the realization was along the lines of "we've been trying to figure out what dinosaurs were like for ages, but it turns out they were all around us all along." It's not just that we knew more about them, we actually knew them, personally, and had known them forever.
Yeah! Awesome! So awesome!
I have no reason to doubt that the current consensus paleontological view is correct given the evidence we have, but it is also important to keep in mind that the evidence is scattered preserved remains of animals who lived lived million to tens of millions of years apart in time.
So with that in mind, I am willing to set up a longbets.org prediction something along the lines of the following. In 2037 (25 years) the following statement will not be viewed as within the scientific consensus at that time. (Will take a look at how it works next week, very busy and traveling for the the next few days.)
"Dinosauria is a clade which includes modern birds* who are the only living descendants of theropod dinosaurs."
*nee dinosaurs
'Tis almost morning, I would have thee gone--
And yet no farther than a wanton's dinosaur,
That lets it hop a little from his hand,
Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,
And with a silken thread plucks it back again,
So loving-jealous of his liberty.
You clearly have your own emotional reasons for preferring a different interpretation, which is fine too.
Hell no!
611 was a buit sarcastic, but 610 is completely missing the point. I'm not claiming that prehistoric birds are not birds, just because they're different than modern birds.
I'm beginning to suspect urple's just taking the piss, in the parlance of our across-the-pond mates.
616: And if had turned out that they branched off slightly earlier from a common archosaur ancestor but shared a lot of common features with dinosaurs that would have been less awesome?
To follow on 620, your "saber-tooth tigers were not mammals" sarcasm is actually exactly backwards. To my ears, "birds are really dinosaurs" is about as sensible as "horses are really prehistoric mammals." Uh, no, they're horses. There are lots of prehistoric mammals that were the direct evolutionary ancestors of horses, but that doesn't make horses prehistoric.
And if had turned out that they branched off slightly earlier from a common archosaur ancestor but shared a lot of common features with dinosaurs that would have been less awesome?
Yeah, it probably would. Nobody cares about those other archosaurs.
I'm a little dinosaur.
There are lots of prehistoric mammals that were the direct evolutionary ancestors of horses, but that doesn't make horses prehistoric.
What about all the prehistoric horses?
625, 626: Well I'm sure you tow have your emotional reasons for thinking that.
Halford just wants birds to be dinosaurs so that it can be true that dinosaurs and cavemen were alive at the same time.
Nobody cares about those other archosaurs.
IF WE WEREN'T VEGETARIANS, TEO WOULD BE THE FIRST TO DIE.
629: I certainly do.
(As a sidenote, this whole "birds are dinosaurs" thing is of course somewhat more complicated emotionally for me than for most people.)
628: Dude, she's only like two weeks older than I am.
631: yeah, I don't disagree with 533. See 298.
Dude, she's only like two weeks older than I am.
Sensitive much?
I mean, 623 was more or less the scientific consensus up until 20 years ago or so, wasn't it? Nobody was all excited about it then.
633.2: Teo and Tippi Hedren, following the debate with rapt attention.
I had to google Hedren. I have of course not seen that movie.
I just don't understand 624 at all. As Teo says, there were lots and lots of prehistoric horses.
It sounds like you want to run with a category "dinosaur" in which, to belong, every animal must definitionally be (a) extinct and (b) not a bird. That's fine, if you want to define your own words, and make both prerequisites of what a "dinosaur" is.
But it doesn't match up very closely even with what I think the rough colloquial definition of a "dinosaur" is, which is something like a "collection of biologically similar animals, including famous charismatic megafauna Velociraptor, T-Rex, Triceratops, and Apatosaurus" that lived and evolved over a roughly 130-million-year period in the Mesozoic Era." Now, it turns out that modern birds are a subset of those animals, and are more closely related to many of them than they are to each other! And, so, they didn't just live in the Mesozoic Era, but live on today. That's new and unfamiliar, but it should bring "bird" comfortably into the category "dinosaur," once you explain a little bit. Little kids seem pretty comfortable with this.
The tree of life. Humans are just to the left of twelve o'clock, between the rats and the chimpanzees. I'm sure there's something relevant in there somehow.
641: No, unless I'm really behind on the science (possible!), modern birds didn't live in the Mesozoic Era. Their direct evolutionary ancestors did.
643: yes, well, modern humans didn't live three hundred years ago. Their direct evolutionary ancestors did.
(And even if it turned out that some modern birds did live in the Mesozoic Era, that wouldn't retroactively make them dinosaurs. See 297.)
And when I awoke, I was alone, this dinosaur had flown.
Quiz for urple:
(1) Without consulting any outside resources, define "raptor". Show your work.
Wait, so now your argument is that, OK, birds were (a subset of) dinosaurs, and were alive in the Mesozoic era, but not modern birds, because modern birds weren't alive in the Mesozoic era, and therefore can't be dinosaurs?* Just trying to get a clear line from you.
*Nb -- modern birds are closer to both Mesozoic birds and other Mesozoic dinosaurs than many of the undisputed Mesozoic dinosaurs were to each other.
Mike Taylor won the thread in 497 (along with x.trapnel in 261).
Honestly, I'm beginning to doubt that there's much more progress that can be made on this issue in this thread. I think everyone has more or less said everything they're going to say. I feel like I'm understanding you pretty clearly, but that you're still misunderstanding me, and I suspect you feel the opposite. And we've been basically repeating ourselves for hundreds of comments.
Honestly, I'm beginning to doubt that there's much more progress that can be made on this issue in this thread.
Ya think?
Urple, define "dinosaur" in three sentences or less, and maybe we can make some progress.
652: I thought your definition in 515 (that you said "no one ever disputed) was basically fine.
At least buy him dinner first, Teo.
All the dinosaurs that were singing have flown except you alone.
So, by definition, the dinosaur must be (a) Mesozoic and (b) extinct?
At least buy him dinner first, Teo.
Patriarchalist.
Which is to say, the category can never be broadened to include anything that doesn't meet those two mandatory criteria?
Actually, Eggplant won the thread in 36.
650: I think everyone has more or less said everything they're going to say.
I was going to say that Smilodon fatalis is a pretty badassed Latin name for an organism.
Yeah. I mean, it's imprecise (not even close to every Mesozoic, extinct thing was a dinosaur), but good enough in rough terms.
659: no, if we discovered some new, non-extinct thing (the T-Rex in the Andes), that would obviously be a dinosaur.
The things in Jurassic Park were dinosaurs, even though they were (sort of) no longer extinct.
I'm thinking I should have stuck with 650. I could just be citing nothing but previous comment numbers at this point.
You should bear in mind that this isn't intended to be a scientifically precise definition. "Dinosaur" isn't a scientific word.
Barney's not real. He's a man in a suit. But the image portrayed: really a dinosaur, or not?
The fact that you felt the need at this late date to spell out 666.1 is actually kind of hilarious.
667/668 aren't serious questions. Were 657/659 serious questions? I've tried to answer them.
OK, that's helpful. I don't think that the requirement of being Mesozoic and extinct as limiting criteria are at all useful -- even for a colloquial definition. You've pointed to some reasons why "extinct" can't be mandatory. "Mesozoic" can't be the defining limit, either, for similar reasons -- it's wildly overinclusive, for a start.
I think the colloquial definition of "dinosaur" is, roughly, a whole lot of animals that are biologically similar to what we think of as the 6-7 core species of dinosaur such as a Triceratops or a T-Rex. Until recently, we thought that these animals didn't include birds, and went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic era. Now, we don't think that; in fact we know that animals that are closely biologically similar to the core dinosaur species are still around. So, "birds are not dinosaurs" is now known to be wrong, even without using a hypertechnical definition of "dinosaur."
It's still the case, of course, that for historical and ordinary-language reasons we say "birds" when we mean "birds," and that if we're referring to "dinosaurs" colloquially we probably mean the extinct ones. But that still doesn't mean that going around saying "birds are not dinosaurs" is OK -- it's wrong, even based on a folk understanding of what a "dinosaur" is.
And with that, I think I'm done.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackdinosaur
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackdinosaur.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackdinosaurs.
III
The blackdinosaur whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackdinosaur
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackdinosaur whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackdinosaur
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden dinosaurs?
Do you not see how the blackdinosaur
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackdinosaur is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackdinosaur flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackdinosaurs
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackdinosaurs.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackdinosaur must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackdinosaur sat
In the cedar-limbs.
That may be the most cladistic racist thing I ever read.
That doesn't scan at all. Therefore, birds are not dinosaurs.
649: woohoo!
We probably wouldn't find this discussion, and its persistence, so ridiculous if it were in the context of law, where essentially the same issues have real consequences; that said, fuck if I'm going to read the last 300 comments, let alone the crucial links. Oh, well.
But there are new questions to ask. Like, let's say you have one bird. Then you get another bird. Assuming you add more birds, one at a time, at what point do you have a flock of dinosaurs?
I think the colloquial definition of "dinosaur" is, roughly, a whole lot of animals that are biologically similar to what we think of as the 6-7 core species of dinosaur such as a Triceratops or a T-Rex. Until recently, we thought that these animals didn't include birds, and went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic era. Now, we don't think that; in fact we know that animals that are closely biologically similar to the core dinosaur species are still around. So, "birds are not dinosaurs" is now known to be wrong, even without using a hypertechnical definition of "dinosaur."
I said earlier that I'm happy to think of this in either of two ways: (1) we now know that some prehistoric bird-like dinosaurs survived the K-T event and evolved to become modern birds, or (2) birds evolved as a thing separate from dinosaurs prior to the K-T event; some birds survived K-T; the dinosaurs didn't.
Those are basically two different ways of saying the same thing*, either of which is more satisfying than your approach.
*Which of (1) or (2) is more biologically accurate, I don't know. It depends on the precise definition of "bird", which I don't feel like getting into at this point.
The precise definition of "bird".
This thread is just fantastic, and I'm really sad I missed it. Though I'd like to think that my yeoman co-trolling with urple kept it alive long enough for today's resurgence. It's interesting to be strongly agreeing with Halford through a whole thread.
I'd like to say I heartily endorse 525, 557, 569, 586, 607, and 615. I also liked 488, 489, 499, and 670.
I actually saw a talk by one of the authors of the paper from the link 506. The audience for the talk included a BAND troll in the audience.
In terms of sheer argument, urple was so victorious in this thread it wasn't even funny.
That said, clearly there are some set of facts that would make urple's distinction pointless, even in terms of popular language. If it turned out, for example, that every dinosaur smaller than a certain size had feathers, then even at the level of popular science it would make sense to say that birds are dinosaurs.
In terms of sheer argument, urple was so victorious in this thread it wasn't even funny.
Someone needs to commemorate this thread with a dramatic painting--maybe Urple parting the waves, Moses-style, dividing the dinosaurs from the birds.
Finally got around to reading this thread. Needless to say, Urple has been right about everything.
This book looks great. I wish there were more customer images.
