RE: small dinosaurs with feathers

["Williams, Tim" <TiJaWi@agron.iastate.edu>]

Stephan Pickering wrote:

> My jestful litigatory remarks are not to be misinterpreted as
> anything other than humour on my part, 

Oh, the hilarity!  Do you do parties?

> although I am not emending the crux of my ideas: dinosaurs = "birds" = 
> dinosaurs, and to break the mind-set of vernacularism we should, with 
> delight, use the word (or combinations of words) "theropod" to describe >
living taxa. 

Barney and I are confused on this point.  It is entirely appropriate to use
the term 'birds' in a scientific context - and editors of all scientific
journals concur.  Of course, as you slide down the evolutionary tree from
_Passer_ to _Archaeopteryx_ (and beyond?) the application of the term 'bird'
becomes more precarious and arbitrary.  But the same applies to 'mammal' and
'amniote' and 'metazoan', and whatever name you care to nominate.  After
all, every clade (except for one - assuming a monophyletic origin of Terran
life) is a subset of a larger clade.  In an evolutionary context, all
multicellular life forms are just conglomerates of bacteria.




Tim