#xkcd No. 3204

Date: 2026-2-6

Title: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

Alt text: Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

https://xkcd.com/3204/

  • Apepollo11@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    17 hours ago

    Taxonomically speaking, birds are dinosaurs.

    There isn’t a place to put a line between them - all the things that make birds “birds” also apply to dinosaurs.

    A super fun fact is that of the two main types of dinosaur, Saurischia (“lizard-hipped”) and Ornithischia (“bird-hipped”), birds actually evolved from the lizard-hipped group.

      • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        7 hours ago

        *bony fish

        We are closer to your average fish (I don’t know any specific ones) with bones than they are with sharks (non-bony, cartilage!)

        • [object Object]@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Herrings, salmon/trout, cod/haddock are all bony fish.

          The vast majority of extant fish are members of Osteichthyes (bony fish).

          In particular, ray-finned fish are bony fish:

          Actinopterygii, members of which are known as ray-finned fish or actinopterygians, is a class of bony fish that constitutes nearly 99% of the over 30,000 living species of fish. The vast majority of extant actinopterygian species are teleosts, and by species count they dominate the subphylum Vertebrata, comprising over 50% of all living vertebrates.

      • ZoDoneRightNow@kbin.earth
        12·
        16 hours ago

        Bony fish specifically but I’d argue that the common name for the clade bony fish is misleading and that bony fish aren’t a subtype of fish but rather a clade of animals descending from a subset of the non-clade category of things we call fish. Not all fish belong to a single clade we can call fish, bony fish descend from one of these unrelated things we collectively refer to as fish.

        • ZoDoneRightNow@kbin.earth
          8·
          16 hours ago

          Basically, I would say the term fish is more like our term for tree (representing a niche rather than clade) unless you would argue all vertebrates are fish. We are a member of the clade bony fish so we are bony fish but we do not fill the same niche as fish so aren’t a fish. So “Bony Fish” is a noun distinct from bony (adjective) fish (noun).