I’m calling bullshit on dinosaurs.
No, I’m not going Carl Everett, I think dinosaurs were and are real (their bones are real, I don’t think they’re living in a lab somewhere, though God do I hope they are and also God does that fill me with fear). I just think the definition of what is and isn’t a dinosaur is kind of arbitrary.
From the Smithsonian:
“Hans-Dieter Sues, the Smithsonian Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, puts it like this. Dinosauria is a group that contains the most recent common ancestor of birds—like a pigeon walking by on the sidewalk—and the non-avian dinosaur Triceratops, Sues says, including all the descendants of that common ancestor.”
Basically, according to the Smithsonian, you can define dinosaurs by going back and finding the most recent great-great-great-…-great-grandparent that any bird shares with any Triceratops, then putting the dino tag on every animal descended from that great-great-great-…-great-grandparent.
This is the definition of subjective.
You know what happened here? We found a bunch of giant dead lizards whose bones were so old they’d turned to rock, we called them “dinosaurs” because it sounded dope, we got kids hooked on them, and then we said, “Whoops, turns out some of these guys had feathers,” and tried to square the circle. Why is a pigeon a dinosaur but a Komodo dragon not, even if Komodo dragons had a living lizard ancestor in the Late Cretaceous, tens of millions of years before the comet wiped out the Triceratops? Maybe the Smithsonian has an answer for that, but it isn’t present in their little “definition.” You go back to the Late Cretaceous, look at a Triceratops, look at Grandpa Komodo, and tell me with a straight face that they aren’t both dinosaurs, Hans-Dieter.
I’m way over my head here, I know that, Steve Brusatte’s gonna kick my ass if I ever get him onto MilkTime. So, I’m going to start phrasing this as a question instead of a statement. Why don’t we just use dinosaur as a loose, subjective term rather than a hard-and-fast definitional classification? I feel like that’d be easier than parsing whether crocodiles are dinosaurs. Also, then we’d get to argue over whether crocodiles are dinosaurs, which I can only assume would invigorate scientific daily talk shows the way MJ vs. LeBron changed sports media forever.
