10 ms·
Why a Pterosaur Is Not a Dinosaur
- xref 8y ago“Dinosaur” is a word for a specific group of creatures united by shared characteristics and which had their own evolutionary history—it is not a catch-all term for anything reptilian and prehistoric" Fascinating, didn't know Pterosauria split off from Dinosauria so far prior to either's evolution.
- lostmsu 8y agoWhen they were building their taxonomy, why did not they name its level, that includes both what they now call "dinosaur" and pterosaurs "dinosaur", and come up with a different name for their "dinosaur", if it is a common conception?
- sulam 8y agoIt's almost as if the conception didn't come to be until _after_ the names for these things existed!
- nonbel 8y agoI think the "common conception" comes from Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, it seems almost everything we learned about dinosaurs from those movies is wrong. Edit: I just looked it up and discovered both were made by Steven Speilberg...
- monocasa 8y agoNah, pterodactyls and such were commonly taught to children to be dinosaurs before Jurassic Park and Land Before Time came out. Source: was child before 1988.
- nonbel 8y agoWhere do you think it originated then?
- jMyles 8y agoCan you link to a source with some detail on what was wrong with those films? Particularly Jurassic Park?
- nonbel 8y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/feb/08/jurassic-park-dinosaur-inaccuracies https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/feb/08/jurassic-par... Or search: "Jurassic park wrong about dinosaurs"
- jMyles 8y agoThis doesn't seem very strong to me. OK, so I have been misinformed about velociraptor - I'll picture it smaller and with feathers. And brachiosaurus might not have been able to made a sound or stand on hind legs. But I don't think that these relatively small details have left a generation woefully misinformed about dinosaurs. If there are major things wrong with the film - if, for example, dinosaurs weren't as "bird-like" as the film made them seem (that seemed to me to be a major overture), then sure, I'd really like to read about that.
- nonbel 8y agoLook up what A t-rex looks/acts like now. No roaring, running, licking, had feathers and freckles: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rex-was-ginger-freckles-feathers-11772112 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rex-was-ginger-freckle... https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/T-Rex-Likely-Could-Not-Roar-Per-TX-Researchers-439182413.html https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/T-Rex-Likely-Could-Not-Roa... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/t-rex-couldnt-stick-out-its-tongue/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/t-rex-couldnt-sti... https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/tyrannosaurus-rex-couldnt-run-says-new-research/ https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/tyrannosaurus-rex...
- chungy 8y agoTo be fair to Jurassic Park, I'm not sure its pterodactyls were explicitly claimed to be dinosaurs, and much of the film talked about non-dinosaur extinct species being resurrected as well (eg, ancient plant life). Maybe it wasn't the filmmakers intent, but they have plausible deniability here. :)
- eftychis 8y agoExactly. I am pretty certain, no such claim was made by the movie. And although it mixes a bunch or eras together, it does not claim to have just brought back dinosaurs.
- cobralibre 8y agoI doubt that specialists are keen to adapt their terminology to reflect popular usage and would much prefer things to work the other way around. It looks like the word we should be using is 'avemetatarsalians'?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoIf one can't pedantically correct people then why even bother being an expert.
- tolmasky 8y agoWell, for starters, as you can see from the graphic, you'd be getting a lot more than just "pterosaurs" if you did that, given that they are in fact quite distantly related, with several other layers of non-dinosaurs inbetween.
- nitwit005 8y agoThe goal of creating the taxonomy was presumably to create clear categories for research and scientific publications. I doubt they cared what an average person called a dinosaur, like the author of this article seems to, so the issue you're worrying about probably didn't seem important.
- mannykannot 8y agoYou seem to think the word was in use prior to the development of taxonomy, but the word "dinosaur" began as a specific taxonomic term, coined by Richard Owen. From the outset, it was recognized that not all Mesozoic reptiles were dinosaurs. If conformance to common usage is an important taxonomic principle, then maybe taxonomists should put the label "fish" in their taxonomies so that whales and cuttlefish are included, as these were commonly regarded as a type of fish prior to the development of scientific taxonomy? This example shows why this principle does not work in general: "fish" would then include a great many species - including ourselves - that are not regarded as fish by anyone.
- aequitas 8y agoUseless fact but since where talking about naming things. The word helicopter is a combination of helix and pteron (spiral wing). https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/helicopter https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/helicopter
- yesenadam 8y agoGreek helix (genitive helikos) + pteron "wing" (from PIE root pet- "to rush, to fly"). https://www.etymonline.com/word/helicopter https://www.etymonline.com/word/helicopter That page says 'helix : "a spiral thing", a word used of anything in a spiral shape (an armlet, a curl of hair, the tendril of a vine, a serpent's coil)' - though all these examples are helices, not spirals; I suspect the author(s) didn't know the difference.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWell you piqued my interest, what's the difference? I note that Wiktionary, and the Oxford Pocket Dictionary (which I believe is what Google use), consider them to be synonyms. For example this from the latter's definition of "spiral" - "winding in a continuous curve of constant diameter about a central axis, as though along a cylinder; helical. synonyms: coiled, helical, helix-shaped, corkscrew, curling, winding, twisting, whorled"
- yesenadam 8y agoA spiral is 2D, like the Archimedean spiral. A helix is 3D, like a spring, or DNA's double helix. Calling them Archimedean helix or DNA's double spiral would make no sense. Dictionaries aren't a great place to find the actual meaning of words. :-) ..mathematical terms, anyway.
- taejo 8y agoMathematics isn't a great place to find the actual meaning of words, either, if by actual meaning you mean the meaning understood by the general native-speaking population.
- quotemstr 8y ago> Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur is an error of the same order of magnitude as saying that our species is a marsupial I'd say it's more like the error of calling a tomato a vegetable. While it's true that from a phylogenetic perspective that pterosauria aren't dinosaurs, they still have many basal characteristics (relative to today's flying dinosaurs, the aves) that give them a certain dinosaur-like quality in the imagination. Besides, they're contemporaneous with the true dinosaurs. Grouping them with the dinosaurs is understandable. The grouping is incorrect under one classification scheme, but correct under another. BTW: this site screws up copy and paste, appending marketing junk to any text copied to the clipboard. I wish it were possible to prohibit these clipboard shenanigans.
- black6 8y ago> I wish it were possible to prohibit these clipboard shenanigans. It is in Firefox, at least: about:config dom.event.contextmenu.enabled = false dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled = false
- umanwizard 8y agoTomatoes are vegetables under any classification scheme.
- mvgoogler 8y agohttps://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/is-a-tomato-a-fruit-or-a-vegetable/ https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/is-a-tomato-a-frui... Nope, tomatoes are technically fruits, though they are commonly considered vegetables. Just like pterosaurs are technically not dinosaurs, but are commonly considered to be in our culture.
- jondubois 8y agoThis article is incorrect, a pterosaur may not be a dinosauria but it definitely is a dinosaur. Dinosaur has become a generic term. You can even refer to humans who have old-school ideas as dinosaurs.
- pvg 8y agoMetaphorical use doesn't count as turning something into a generic term. You can call obstinate humans buttheads, and yet, etc. This is more in the 'a gorilla is not a monkey' or 'a dolphin is not a fish' category. Getting this sort of thing wrong is going to get you torn apart by gangs of roaming five-year-olds on your next natural history museum visit.
- perl4ever 8y agoEven though mammals are a subset of the descendants of things that are unquestionably fish, we don't call mammals fish, and we do call things fish that are of separate ancestry, so I feel there is kind of an arbitrary double standard here if we get pedantic about dinosaurs. There's no question that in general, categories of living creatures don't have to be monophyletic.
- gus_massa 8y ago"Fish" is a bad category, or to be more precise from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish#Taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish#Taxonomy > Fish are a paraphyletic group: that is, any clade containing all fish also contains the tetrapods, which are not fish. For this reason, groups such as the "Class Pisces" seen in older reference works are no longer used in formal classifications. I think we mostly agree, because you wrote > There's no question that in general, categories of living creatures don't have to be monophyletic. But I think that the main effort is to make all the categories monophyletic, and drop/replace the other one when possible. Some non monophyletic categories are very useful in practice and they are keep to make communication easier. The problem is that if you try to make "fish" a monophyletic category you must put "dolphins" inside them, because the dolphins are distant descendants of some fish (as you and me and all mammals). But Pterosaur and Dinosaur are sibling categories, neither of them descend of the other. Using much smaller categories, it is like comparing penguins and orcas (both are black and white, both swim, both have to breath air, both eat fish), but neither of them descend of the other.
- comesee 8y agoPelicans seem to evolve from pterosaurs but ostriches seem to have come from theropods. Since those are both birds, I would guess pterosaurs and theropods are just as closely related as pelicans and ostriches.
- quotemstr 8y agoI'm really curious about where you learned that.
- comesee 8y agoNatural history museum in LA. They have a big exhibit on theropods and pterosaurs and show the birds that possibly evolved from them. Birds are dinosaurs under all the usual biological classification schemes. Similar phenotypes, similar genotypes.
- nickserv 8y agoAre you sure it was "evolved from" and not "looks like"? Because pterosaurs have no living descents, and all birds descended from therapod dinosaurs (even if birds were already widespread before the end of the Cretaceous).
- comesee 8y agoYeah it might seem that way but pelicans don't come from pterosaurs.
- bbgm 8y agoNot quite. Birds, in general, appear to have evolved from a subset of theropods. They are in the same clade. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_06 https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_0... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/50-million-years-of-incredible-shrinking-theropod-dinosaurs/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/50-mil...
- andrewflnr 8y agoThe article linked at the top of this one is quite readable, a few technical terms aside. I recommend it. The referenced part about how pterosaurs launched is very near the end.
- curtis 8y agoOn a tangential note, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the notion that a flying reptile the size of Quetzalcoatlus (believed to have wingspan on the order of 10 meters) could ever get airborne. This has made me wonder if it's possible that juvenile Quetzalcoatlus could fly but adult Quetzalcoatlus could not. Natural selection would presumably select towards smaller and smaller wings on adults, but maybe this could be offset by a serious evolutionary advantage bestowed on juveniles from being able to fly. I don't know of any bird existing or extinct with this kind of lifecycle, but maybe you can find something similar in insects?
- andrewflnr 8y agoThe idea of older individuals being flightless is specifically addressed in the Plos article linked at the top. Basically, the large individuals still have lots of flight-optimized characteristics that you would expect to have atrophied if they weren't flying.
- curtis 8y agoFrom the referenced article [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013982 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...]: > It is possible, however, that giant pterosaurs represent old, flightless individuals of a species that were capable of flight when younger, their flight anatomy simply being retained from a previous stage in their life history. However, if the maximum flight sizes suggested by Sato et al. [17] and Chatterjee and Templin [19] are correct at 41kg (5.1 m span) or 70 kg (6.65 m with ‘heavy’ estimates), then the largest azhdarchids would have grown up to six times the mass and twice the wingspan of their terminal flight size. It seems unlikely that enormous azhdarchids would continue to develop their physiologically expensive flight apparatus, and coincidentally with a mechanically appropriate scaling regime, throughout such extensive growth under flightless conditions. The same point is true, though to a lesser extent, for large Pteranodon that also bear obvious flight characteristics despite having exceeded the suggested wingspan limits of flight. If anything, the scaling regimes of pterosaur wings dictate that the flight characteristics of giant pterosaurs (the size of their deltopectoral crests, robustness of their joints) - become more exaggerated with size and age (e.g. [76]), precisely the opposite of what would be expected in animals that lost their flight ability as they grew older. This doesn't help me understand the physics of large flying reptiles, but it does make a plausible argument that they were in fact real.
- Izkata 8y agoEhh, they're using the name "Dinosauria" as evidence that people use "dinosaur" wrong. I'd say they're misunderstanding the word "dinosaur". It's a bit like (though in reverse) how "canine" is often used for the Canis genus (dogs), but is easily confused for "canid" (the Canidae family) which includes foxes and tanukis.
- p1necone 8y agoThis reminds me of the "fun fact" that people throw around about tomatoes being a fruit. Really there are two sets of terms - culinary and botanical. Botanically tomatoes are a fruit yes, but they are also a vegetable. And in the culinary context you would never use a tomato like a fruit. The English language is defined by it's usage, and the same word can mean different things in different contexts. Dinosaur is used commonly to refer to Pterosaurs in the "general" context, so a Pterosaur is a Dinosaur in that context. If you were instead a biologist talking in the context of academia then a Pterosaur would not be a Dinosaur.
- Rexxar 8y agoI'm nitpicking but tomatoes are (sometimes) use as a fruit in culinary context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_jam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_jam
- desdiv 8y agoTo be pedantic, the first Wiki link in that article goes to the Fruit preserves article[0], which begins with: "Fruit preserves are preparations of fruits, vegetables and sugar, often stored in glass jam jars." So while tomato jam is a type of fruit preserve, not all fruit preserves are made of fruits (despite the name). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_preserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_preserves
- dleslie 8y agoI enjoy thinking of salsa as a fruit salad.
- 8y ago
- ggm 8y agobecause pluto isn't a planet? I mean sure, inside the discipline knowing the distinction between an integer and an ordinal number matters, but outside? Less sure. I'm going to keep mentally filing pterosaurs in dinosoar memory. I think 99% of the non-obsessives older than 12 will do likewise. Pluto came back from the dead, after all...
- dzdt 8y agoRelated : a ladybug is not a bug. [1] Scientific nomenclature and common language often disagree! [1] https://theamericanscholar.org/a-bug-is-not-a-beetle/#.W5-t5p8pA0M https://theamericanscholar.org/a-bug-is-not-a-beetle/#.W5-t5...