Re: small dinosaurs with feathers

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

     Dinosaurs are dinosaurs are dinosaurs. Is there confusion in this? Some dinosaur clades survived the K/T boundary events, perhaps for several million years, while some dinosaur clades survived, adapted, and are everywhere on this planet. I hardly think it "confusing" to refer to living theropods as theropod dinosaurs, nor is it "annoying" to realize that the thousands of species of dinosaurs alive in 2002 are dinosaurs. The vernacular word "bird" cannot be suppressed, to be sure, as the intellectually challenged cling to it like children cling frantically to their favourite blanket and binkie. I choose to ignore the word "bird" because extant, avialian theropods cannot -- repeat: cannot -- be diagnosed without, first, recognizing them as dinosaurs. And some of the responses to what I am saying are amazing, in light of the work vis-a-vis dinosaur systematics since!
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984. If you do not like my use of "dinosaur" for extant avialian theropod taxa, then you can genuflect before the shadow of Barney and Godzilla because, as it stands, you are revealing more about your juvenality than about dinosaurs.