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Re: Fw: Most popular/common dinosaur misconceptions



Hmm.  I think that now it _is_ time to move on and accept that
Dinosauria includes birds.  But we may as well be honest with
ourselves and admit that the scientists who made it so screwed up.
Everyone knew what "dinosaur" meant.  It would have been better to
discard the taxon Dinosauria when it became apparent that it was
paraphyletic, define a new name for the clade (_Iguanodon_ +
_Megalosaurus_) and let everyone keep on using the well-established
vernacular term to mean what it always meant.

I agree. (It's not just vernacular -- no scientist had included birds in dinosaurs before 1974.)


But I realise that ship has sailed.

Quite so.

Same with Reptilia.

I'm not so pessimistic on that one. For example, it is missing from the classification of the 3rd edition of Benton's Vertebrate Palaeontology -- Amniota and Sauropsida do just fine.