• Pipoca@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

    Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

    If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

    Also fun is that there’s a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.