Comment on Why is land/sky so cleanly split between mammals/birds?
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks agoThe first flying dinosaur evolved from a non-flying dinosaur. The word for a “flying dinosaur” is “bird”. (Sort of. Bird isn’t a scientific term, arguably crown-group birds don’t include the first flying dinosaurs. But in that case the first bird evolved from a flying dinosaur which evolved from non-flying dinosaurs, so it still works.)
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I guess I’m forgetting that there were several different dinosaur periods spanning hundreds of millions of years. My mind defaults to the jurassic period being the only one.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Most of the more famous dinosaurs were actually from the cretaceous period. T. rex, stegosaurus, velociraptor (and the deinonychus and utahraptor that the movie Jurassic Park’s depiction of “velociraptor” was based on), triceratops, ankylosaurus. Pretty much all the non-avian dinosaurs the average person could name, other than sauropods like brachiosaurus, lived in the cretaceous. Some of those I named did admittedly first evolve in the jurassic, but most are most well-known in the cretaceous.
Though fwiw, birds did first evolve in the jurassic.