Anita: If you think about it, Komodo Lizard just doesn’t have the oomph! that Komodo Dragon does. They must have a good agent.
This thread is making me hungry. I could eat the hindquarters of a deer at this point.
What about that smelly tongue they have?
The lizards around my house seem to have nostrils, as do crocodiles and alligators, but the Komodo seems (from what I recall) to use it’s tongue more like like a snake does.
…No…they have a red darting tongue which brings in air to their smelling glands.
Anita, the first westerner who encountered them thought that a 200 lb (90 kg) lizard seemed very close in description to a dragon. It’s metaphor.
Bumping this 2002 thread because Cecil’s column is back on the front page.
Any developments on the classification of these critters since Cecil wrote the column in 1995?
I read the column earlier and the first thing that struck me was the description of Dinosaurs as Big, Ugly and Dead.
I can happily tell my Ex Wife that Cecil said her mother was a dinosaur.
Is your ex’s mother related to Ken Ham? I heard he descended from dinosaurs. Or lived at the same time as them. Ken Ham said so himself.
From a quick perusal of Wikipedia, not really. Dinosauria, as an unranked clade, is currently defined as the most recent common ancestor of modern birds and Triceratops, and all of that ancestor’s descendants. That includes theropods (including modern birds), sauropods, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs, ceratopsians, and ornithopods. It excludes pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and crocodilians, all of which split off from the archosaur line before the ornithischian and saurischian dinosaur lines split from each other.
(Ironically, birds are not in the ornithischian line, even though the word means “bird-hipped”. The ornithischian dinosaurs evolved bird-like hips long before birds did.)
Powers &8^]
Thanks. Good to know.
It’s 12 years late but what a fascinating OP, Darwin’s Finch! This is exactly the sort of Dope stuff I love.
Thanks, Inner Stickler!
This is probably a good time to note that, while there have been a number of interesting fossils discovered for both dinosaurs and pterosaurs in the past 12 years, there has been little improvement of the fossil record for early pterosaurs, unfortunately. The Ornithodira hypothesis (that is, pterosaurs are a sister group to Dinosauria within Ornithodira) is still the most widely accepted hypothesis as far as pterosaur relationships go.
One of the better recent books on pterosaurs is Mark Witton’s Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy.
I think a lot of modern schoolkids know that birds are dinosaurs, nowadays. This has been widely publicized in casual dinosaur literature.
I agree with this position, BUT—
At what point do we move on and say the offshoot just is what it is? I mean, we that, while we do say that salmon, ceolocanths, lizards, allosaurs, birds, and shrews are vertebrates, we don’t say that they’re all fish (even though they must have some fishy common ancestor)!
(Actually, I don’t travel in taxonomic circles, so I should admit that I really don’t know what those guys say or don’t say.) But waht do they say about this?
In an ideal world, we would say that they’re all fish, but there are limits to what can be achieved in the world as it is. It is the reason, though, that “reptile” is being replaced (with all deliberate speed) by “amniote”.
I think calling birds ‘dinosaurs’ is confusing. As it is we should distinquish between ‘dinosaur’ and members of ‘dinosauria’. Redefining scientific terms is generally a bad idea. It gets worse when the words have a popular definition well established in the minds of people.
“Reptile” is not synonymous with “amniote”, though. Amniotes were the ancestors of two major groups: the Sauropsida (containing all modern reptiles and birds and their most recent common ancestor) and Synapsida (containing all modern mammals and their most recent common ancestor).
I think the key to grasping all of the “new” taxonomy is to realize that the bulk of Linnaean taxonomy was not based in evolution; it was based on similarity of appearance. Thus, “reptiles” were considered everything that looked lizardy, which is why many people still think critters such as Dimetrodon where reptiles, even though they were more closely related to mammals than they were to any modern reptiles. The definitions of taxonomic groups are constantly changing as we learn more about the relationships of various organisms.
They say that they’re all Sarcopterygians (“fleshy-finned fishes”, as opposed to the “ray-finned fishes”, or Actinopterygians).
The thing that bothers me about fish:
Both Sharks and Salmon are considered fish. A whale is not considered a fish. But a whale (or, for that matter, a human) is more closely related to a salmon than a salmon is to a shark. At which point the only reasonable course of action is to admit that “fish” is not really a good descriptor. At least when the definition of “fish” is “every vertebrate that lives in water, with a few exceptions”
Perhaps the best course of action would be to restrict “fish” to ray-finned fishes, which is what most people mean they’re hunting when they go fishing. Sharks are sharks and fish are fish and lampreys are lampreys and tetrapods are tetrapods, and a tetrapod is not a fish but neither is a shark or a lamprey. But that would be too reasonable.
That definition would still exclude at least one other important kind of fish: http://www.mybrilliantmistakes.com/wp-content/uploads/abe_vigoda.jpg
Actually, one very recent fossil discovery has thrown a great deal of confusion into the relationship between sharks and bony fishes.
Is it possible pterosaurs had feathers? Typically they are depicted as having stretched membranous wings that seem rather batlike, but in recent years it has become accepted that some, perhaps most, dinosaurs bore feathers. I get that feathers don’t fossilize well and direct evidence would be sparse. But what is the current consensus on pterosaur feathers?