Birds are Dinosaurs - How Taxonomy Works 

The fact birds are dinosaurs means those frozen dino nuggets are pieces of fried dinosaur meat in the shape of dinosaurs.

I don't get what's hard to understand for skeptics about how lineages split off from others, sharing common ancestors etc. Birds are just one lineage of maniraptoran theropods. I dislike when people just call birds descendants of dinosaurs which is incorrect when birds literally are dinosaurs

When I throw out chips in parking lots, I tell people: "I'm feeding the dinosaurs".

i really want to know what Linnaeus was doing classifying minerals in the same way as animals lol

To be honest, the thing that irks most me about the bird and Dino is sort of the opposite of the comments shown in the video. And is comments saying that “Chickens are the closest relative or descendant of Trex” which is flawed. Birds were already starting to appear way before trex or raptors showed up and diverged.

A significant number of people who come to the biology and evolution channel are actually creationists. They hold a very human-oriented view of the world, and for them, it is almost impossible to think that humans are not the center of the universe. At the basic level, everything is always subject to change as the environment changes.

We can't pin point when dinosaurs started becoming birds in the fossil record, because it's a rule in evolution that there isn't a first of... anything. This is because the offspring of one organisms and the parents of the same organism, look indistinguishable from one another, and you have to really be looking, to spot any differences.

That was a nicely balanced assessment of taxonomy, which is sometimes imprecise and fungible depending on the available fossils. And as you pointed out with the dire wolf, convergent evolution can mislead even diligent biologists. I enjoyed the example of the flatbread cladistic tree as an example. That was fun. You also wisely chose eukaryotes for your focus. At the microbial level it gets more challenging since there is a lot of gene swapping with plasmids and other genetic bits being traded between organisms. And new microbes can evolve in weeks. What determines a new "species" of E. coli often comes down to a consensus opinion among infectious disease specialists but it may not be black and white phylogenetically.

I am so delighted to have learned that birds are actually dinosaurs. Every day I go out in the yard and say "Hello, little therapods" to the birds in my trees.

If a whale can be a mammal, I see no problem with birds being classified as dinosaurs.

“If it looks like a bird, and acts like a bird, it *must* be a dinosaur.” If you know, you know.

I feel another thing that people have a hard time grasping is the concept of Natural Selection being indeterministic and the contemplating genetic changes over time. Like when we say Crocodiles are Prehistoric but don’t say the same for Birds? People say, uhhhh Horseshoe Crabs have survived like all Mass Extinctions same with Nautiloids but so did we.. our ancestors have survived every extinction so far but people in general have a hard time wrapping our heads around the idea of what ‘change’ looks like. I think it is simply because people place too much emphasis on explainable stories we love telling ourselves like the Carcinization meme about every body plan converging on that of a crab like it is some self-fulfilling prophecy when it isn’t really. Niches have plenty of different ways of being exploited.

I don't understand why we even need videos explaining the taxonomy behind it, because birds resemble a typical theropod more than a whale does to a typical mammal. People shouldn't need to ask why birds are dinosaurs if they have eyes. They should be able to look at a picture of a velociraptor and then a picture of an eagle and go "Oh, ok." but they can't for some reason.

This is a really good breakdown, and I'm definitely going to be using the term "fancy lungfish" in the future, particularly when describing certain people.

im just a person , who dont have a education in theese fields. im a bricklayer. even i understand, that birds evolved from non avian dinosaurs. even my small brain can understand that.

Correction: Birbs are perfectly tasty and consumable dinosaurs! Speaking of... were the theropods themselves edible is truly an unspoken topic /s

Ah yes, I remember as a kid in the 90s watching Paleoworld on The Discovery Channel when the debate on whether or not dinosaurs were birds was raging.

Non-avian dinosaurs being a more frequently used term does well to highlight this.

It always kinda throws me off to hear or say that birds are reptiles. I realized that they were about a year ago, but they just don't have the connotations that tend to come with the word "reptile" like scaly skin and ectothermic metabolism. But they do excrete waste like reptiles (like was said in the video), and another trait that actually seems pretty reptilian when I think about it is the beak. Most of the other animals that I think of with beaks are reptiles, including non-avian dinosaurs like ceratopsians and hadrosaurs, as well as turtles and tortoises. Besides reptiles, the only other animals that I can think of with beaks or bills are the platypus, dicynodonts, certain types of fish, and mollusks like cephalopods and nudibranchs. Maybe it's just coincidence, but I do wonder if reptiles are more prone to evolving beaks than other lineages of tetrapods. Edit: some other reptile groups that evolved beaks that I forgot about earlier: pterosaurs, stegosaurs, ankylosaurs, pachycephalosaurs, and therizinosaurs. I'm sure there's other animals that I'm either forgetting about or don't know about, however these are yet more dinosaur and reptile lineages that evolved beaks (although I don't know if beaks evolved multiple times within thyreophora and within marginocephalia or just once in each group)

The comment saying that lizards are descendants of dinosaurs is frustrating. Lizards did not come from dinosaurs. When we dug up dinosaur fossils, we saw that they were reptiles and attributed lizard-like qualities to them based on limited information. We now know that many dinosaurs had feathers, were warm-blooded, and cared for their young, just as birds do today.

I was just listening to a podcast about Gigantopithecus blacki, and apparently that thing is also basically just a large number of teeth - and few mandibles I think. The holotype itself is it seems just an isolated lower molar, and not even found in situ but bought in a Hong Kong drugstore being sold as "dragon bones". Yet the researchers speaking about it were relatively happy with having the teeth! They'd like more of the animal ofc, but literally said - if I had to pick between having just a bone or a tooth, I'd rather have a tooth, and continued explaining how teeth actually and perhaps counterintuitively tell a lot about the animal. Is it because they're mammals that the teeth are much more diagnostic than in the case of troodon or else - why the different attitude?

Very cool introduction taxonomy. Sometimes I hear "paraphyletic" and "monophyletic tree" in those paleo videos and I generally don't understand what they mean by that. Do you you plan to do a second video to extend on those kinds of challenges met by paleontologists that you generally don't learn about in highschool (it is the last time I studied biology) ?

Cladistics makes wayyy more sense than paraphyly most of the time, which is why i strongly agree with “birds are dinosaurs”. Paraphyly is mostly a consequence of the methods we had to classify in the past, and shouldnt be continued into the present. Terms like “fish” are examples of paraphyly, where they describe an animal based off of features more so than their actual evolutionary (and sometimes even physical) relationships. They also mean that people kind of generalise those animals more and dont focus on how insanely diverse fish are. Fish dont look as diverse as tetrapods from our perspective and yet they are miles more diverse than all tetrapods when you really look into it. Probably because we have already divided the tetrapods into neat little categories that we are all familiar with (reptiles, mammals, amphibians) through paraphyly. Im not saying paraphyly should be completely destroyed and we should never talk of fish as “fish” and all that, but that we should make an effort not to continue it for newly discovered animals. Paraphyly doesnt even follow its own rules, because the points at which we distinguish animals can be quite arbitrary. And thats where dinosaurs come in. When new discoveries in understanding dinosaurs and such came through, cladistics was already really picking up and became the new, and way more useful way to classify animals, and the term “dinosaur” became more mainstream. It was from that we quickly understood that birds are a modern lineage of dinosaurs that have continued into the present, so surely we should have just called birds dinosaurs from the beginning, but even now most people make the distinction rather than saying “non avian dinosaurs”. Its even weird to think about them being seperate things when you realise avian and non avian dinosaurs coexisted for millions of years, they didnt just suddenly appear when non avian dinosaurs went extinct. Birds were a normal part of the ecosystem and lived among other dinosaurs, if they didnt survive into the present we wouldnt make the distinction. Its just because they “look different” people get funny about, even though some of the close relatives of birds (like jeholornis, or even closer hesperornis) were getting equally heavily adapted to specific niches, and it becomes really weird to say birds arnt dinosaurs but those arguably even stranger animals are. I think saying birds arnt dinosaurs is almost like saying whales arnt mammals.

I've been putting a DINOSAUR CARCASS on my Thanksgiving table all these years? OMG! I'm switching to something nicer, like a swine leg. Spiral cut! Yeah, that's the ticket!

Crazy to see read those comments 😆 And many of them are getting angry by their own.

My little budgies think they're little raptors. I love my birbs.

I’d say that tortillas are more an example of convergent evolution, considering that they originated in the Americas while most other flatbreads have a more Eurasian ancestry. But other than that, I’d say the flatbread analogy is quite sound.

0:10 The comment at the bottom gave me brain damage.

I really honestly think the vast majority of the backlash is from Creationists, many whom now accept that dinosaurs existed (although not as long ago as palenontolgist and geologists say). But they will never accept that birds came from dinosaurs because that goes against their very literal interpretations of Genesis. I suppose this is some progress from when I was a kid and the argument was that Satan buried dinosaur bones to confuse and mislead humanity. 🤷

"But if we come from apes, how come there are still apes?"

birds are literally one of many flying dinos, lots flew without flight feathers. it took a while for me to wrap my head around it, but is absolutley wonderful

I don’t understand how people can disagree that birds are dinosaurs. Anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time around chickens will realize that they’re dinosaurs, and they are very aware of the fact that they are dinosaurs.

I am just here for the Flat Bread content.

Never thought I'd see a Flatbread Phylogeny tree in a video about birds being dinosaurs clarification; fuckin fantastic stuff.

Excellent video. I find it to be a great topic. I like to see all the fossils we find as small snapshots in time. They're points in a line

Also, not all lizards have overlapping scales, monitor lizards just have scales next to each other, while Iguanas have both (I'm pretty sure)

Tunicates are related to me. Not the pelagic ones, though. That would be revolting!

I’m currently doing a literature review titled ‘there’s no such thing as a fish..’ which is about clades and taxonomy. It feels like the whole issue comes from the perspective of perceiving change of the evolution of certain organisms. When people think of dinosaurs, they think of things like sauropods, ornithopods, ceratopsians, and theropods. So when you say that birds are dinosaurs, it can confuse a lot of people. I think the best way is to say that birds are theropods, and by extension are dinosaurs, since dinosaurs in general are incredibly diverse when birds only part of one particular group. I think the main confusion stems from how we name things traditionally and how we generalise them such as fish, amphibians, and reptiles. It would be a bit better if we named every clade as fairly as possible, and educate more people into how taxonomy and evolution work, so people can get a better understanding in how taxonomy work. Because it seems like going around calling everyone a fish without clear context is fuelling the anger of the public’s traditional thinking.

My zoology professor once said in a lecture, "Never trust a comfortable taxonomist."

fabulous overview, thanks

My accountant is licensed in taxonomy.

Little leopard gecko looked like he was wearing a costume of himself 😂

No one belives me when I tell them this. Literally whenever I mention it in a RU-vid comment I have to say google it of you don't believe me.

the fact that people would rather blindly follow a mythical person with magic powers that lives in the sky but won't even dare look into evolution is bizarre to me genuinely. creatures changing to better survive in their environment or to develop resistance to weather, disease, etc is immensely more feasible than a sky wizard. people are weird as fuck.

The fact that insects poop is why flies disgust me so much.

10:59/11:02 Have there been any recent trips to the Judith River Formation where they may have found post dental & cranial material that belong to those aforementioned tooth taxa? Cause if not, hopefully there are people who might go out there and solve this issue.

Something I've been wanting your opinion. Saurophaganax, same genus (notice I didn't say species) as Allosaurus? Mapusaurus, same genus as Giganotosaurus?

Very clear and well laid out explanation. Great video!

Very interesting but your example with the flatbreads made me very hungry.

Mitochondria - The powerhouse of the cell. 😂

I need help navigating Mesquite! I am a Biology teacher and I would love to have my kids screen put on cladograms . Do you have any tutorials? Or any ideas?

ahahahah those screenshots made me laugh my ass out... not only those people are arrogantly stating that birds are not dinos, while from at least a few decades it's universally accepted that they actually undoubtedly ARE, but they're even talking about god and creationism. LOL

Those comments shown at the start made me physically ache.

Thanks for the info!

What’s your favorite dinosaur and tell me about it

like number 1000. that feels cooler than i expected

That's funny, just yesterday I was telling someone that birds are dinosaurs and the very next day I see this.

That one comment that's calling dinosaurs lizards is so ignorant why doesn't he just go directly to crocodiles

I think you meant keratin (a protein) not beta-carotene (a red-orange hydrocarbon pigment). Even so.

Those comments at the 00:10 mark are hilariously sad....it should be common knowledge, but as we can see, it is not....

most the people making those complaints deny evolution.

How far do you want to go? Actually animals(including humans) and plants and everything else are all just highly evolved LUCA.

Bird

HELP ME MY SCIENCE TEACHER THINKS SHARKS ARE INVERTEBRATES BECAUSE THEIR BONES ARE MADE OF CARTILAGE HELPPP MEEEEEEEEEEEE

The way you pronounced "naturate" sounds like the Italian language scene from Inglorious Bastards... Arrivederci becoming "a river there chief"

I got into a whole war about this one day its still going to this day

B I r d

Birds are also reptiles.

Finally, someone mentioned the dino train character when they talked about the trodon

I would also like to suggest that crocodiles are considered to be as distant from lizards and snakes as are birds. Obviously, they are, but we lump crocs in with these other reptiles despite them being archosaurs like their feathered counterparts. It’s easy to see why; exothermy and greenish scales, but the single biggest thing for me is the complex circulatory system and that the current metabolism of the extant suchians appears to be an evolutionary adaptation from historic endothermy (or mesothermy). There was a great example of this on the BBC science page today, lauding the parthenogenesis of a captive croc, observed (rarely) in other groups including birds. It went on to discuss the significant implication this could also have for dinosaurs with whom they had a shared ancestry… Seemingly missing the elephant bird in the room that this event has already been witnessed in real living dinosaurs 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ In general though, there are no hard lines in nature, no demarcation where one thing becomes someone else, it’s just a spectrum, so says this supposed H. sapiens carrying a 2% payload of H. neanderthalensis, the offspring of who knows what earlier hominids and australopiths…

You know don't worry that much about what these people think Izzy, people who deny that birds are dinosaurs (and by extent reptiles) are at best extremely ignorant and at worst simply morons, stay with the great work 😄

I agree that birds are indeed dinosaurs. But to me, there are 2 domains of life: Prokarya and Eukarya. In turn, there are 6 kingdoms of life (Archaea, Bacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia).

My top 2 favorite facts: 1. Birds are dinosaurs 2. Humans are fish

Imagine being that 4th commenter on 0:09 who got that birds descended from theropods (and thus are theropods) but not that theropods (including Tyranno-fucking-saurus rex) are dinosaurs.

It's also worth mentioning that strictly speaking, taxonomy doesn't depend on evolution. Birds are dinosaurs because of a pattern of shared traits, regardless of how that came to be. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not questioning evolution. I'm just pointing out that taxonomy is purely a method of classification. It doesn't assume anything.

Those comments made me weep for mankind... holy shit how can people be so stupid... The "birds are reptiles" thing is meaningless nonsense, though. Reptile is a grade, not a clade, it's paraphyletic. If birds are reptiles, then so are mammals, which... makes reptiles synonymous with amniotes. Which, if that's how you wanna play it, sure, go for it, but at that point what you're describing as "a reptile" is no longer a reptilian trait, it's an amniote trait, and skin shedding is not an amniote trait. They are sauropsids, diapsids, saurians, archelosaurs, archosaurs, avemetarsalians, etc., but "reptile" is as taxonomically valid as monkey (which excludes apes despite apes being derived monkeys), prosauropods (which includes all sauropods), or fish. I know you said that thing about the "fancy lungfish," which is true, but we aren't literally fish, fish is a grade. The closest you can come is "osteichthyes" which has "fish" in it after a fashion, however people tend to use "euteleostomes" which is cladistically synonymous just to avoid indirectly calling people fish. Also, this video as a whole is kind of misleading in the way it talks about Linnean taxonomy, and if you didn't know better you might come away thinking that that's still what we use and how we talk about relationships between organisms. Linnean taxonomy is fundamentally different in nature and purpose from modern cladistics. It only seeks to group like things into categories, it never had any kind of explanatory or predictive power, nor was it ever meant to, because it's was purely a curiosity. Some things are more like others, I mean he classified rocks the same way, he thought rocks were exactly as related to each other as living things. The ancient convention of "domains" and "kingdoms" and all that crap are vestigal leftovers from a system people have scrapped for parts. What taxonomic ranks is the group containing all bilaterally symmetrical animals? It doesn't HAVE one, because those are ancient cave man ideas, real life taxonomy does not have "ranks" because that's not how nature works. Evolution is a process that continually changes perpetually, not one that organizes itself into progressively smaller groups before magically transforming into something else.

you narration is very soothing and engaging. You should narrate more videos in other subjects as well

Weird that the term ‘clade’ is never mentioned. A clade is a group of organisms sharing a common ancestor. The term dinosaurs refers to a clade. Birds belong to the clade dinosaurs because they share the same ancestor as all other, now extinct, dinosaurs.

I think the debate about whether birds are dinosaurs comes from different people having different ideas about groups of living organisms really are. I'm sure you will have very little opposition in saying that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but to start saying that they ARE dinosaurs because of that is where the opposition comes from. If you say that birds are dinosaurs, you have to say that trees are algea, humans are lungfish as you said, eukaryotes are prokaryotes, there's at least one single celled organism that's a dog, monocots are dicots, etc. And when these groups are all defined based on morphological traits, these definitions get all messed up when grouping them purely on evolutionary relationships like this. I think there's a difference of opinion on how groups of living things should be organized on a fundamental level.

I have chickens and they're definitely dinosaurs because they're clever girls. OK, one of them is kinda stupid but the others are like, dog smart.

I have already come back to this video it to link someone who is wrong on the internet. "tHeY nOt DiNoSaUrS, jUsT dEsCeNdEd FrOm DiNoSaUrS!"

First, respect to Zeek for the immense amount of highly-informative, up-to-date material he makes accessible. He's a big-hearted guy, who wears his heart upon his sleeve. I'm grateful for his perspectives on the ethics of science. It's possible to be detached from the world and merely fascinated by the information it offers. He shows us that there is another, human dimension. Big respect. But if you wear your heart upon your sleeve, daws are going to PECK at it! The litany of illnesses, forest-fires, wasp-stingings etc make me think WOW, this guy's parents must really have PISSED OFF some old gypsy woman!! No wonder he looks worried! But, to the point of this talk .... I think that palaeontologists are dazzled by the recent confirmation that the birds are descended from the dinosaurs. Ergo the constant reference to the "non-avian" dinosaurs. But is there any way in which a bird is a dinosaur in which T. Rex is not a fish? Zeek skirts round the issue by saying that, actually, we are LUNGFISH. "Fish" are clearly a paraphyletic group. Nobody ever says "the non-tetrapod fish". Zeek himself has used the word "fish", and nobody thinks that he's talking about zebras, T. Regina or KITTENS!! Point being, even specialists use words in ways which are not strictly cladistic. Fish are blah-de-blah that live in water. Dinosaurs are blah-de-blah which died out at the end of the Cretaceous. These terms are meaningful and everybody knows what they mean. Is there a point at which creatures become their own thing, biologically or ecologically, and it is not particularly meaningful or helpful to refer to them in terms of their ultimate ancestry?

I think it’s more so a matter of cladistics than it is a matter of taxonomy.

Great video, keep up the great work.

Yea, only being able to use morphological traits to classify long extint animals is not the best. The thing I always think about is that there are definitely extint animals that shouldn’t get their own species name, because they might be individuals with defects (individuals that were like born with bone defects).

This discussion is about semantics at its core this is why everyone is confused even specialists about these fields. Main dicussion revolves between Ortnithologs and Paleanthologs

what is the software program called for taxonomy im writing a paper bout it

I really enjoy taxonomy and learning a species origins.

I don't think there's any controversy in this aspect, except perhaps within fanatical religious circles that believe blindly in supernatural intervention. The comments you mentioned at the beginning only demonstrate that some people are rude, uneducated, and not willing to learn, even though we have more knowledge available online than ever before

0:09 whoever @Degew is, praise!

Its important to note the opposite extreme is also not productive. There are people who deny the relevance of all derived traits. An animal’s ancestry and its adaptations are all important in defining what it is. Crabs and trees are polyphyletic groups that demonstrate the importance of derived traits or analogous biology. An apple tree may be an angiosperm but that doesnt make it a water lily.

Birds are also fish as well.

Honestly I wonder if adding "glorified lungfish" in my dating bio self-description would change anything. I must think of a decent hypothesis before the experiment tho...

“No strategy better than te other, eh?” We’ll just see who survives the next extinction event, Lungfish. Or should I say, CHUMPfish!? It’s ON!!

I'm not sure, but it seems to me that for those species (extant ones and those that recently went extict) for which we have DNA, it's a lot easier to establish a more or less definitive "phylogeny of descent". Where things necessarily get speculative is where all we have are physical traits from fossils. In those cases, the many cases of convergent evolution we see in life forms today (and that undoubtedly occurred in eons past) undoubtedly don't perfectly match the true genetic phylogenies, but we'll likely never know where...

So interesting-thank you

I'm glad that we've started to address the lungfish in the room.

If Ur still confused somehow, birds are dinosaurs but (not all) dinosaurs are birds because the dinosaurs that are birds are avian therapods dinosaurs while dinosaurs have 3 main lineages and birds evolved from one of them. Which are non avian therapod dinosaur dependants

Human aren't that similar to lungfish though. Birds are a lot more like other theropods.

Fantastic video black power!