Current Events > ''The dinosaurs didn't adapt. The dinosaurs are no longer here. Adapt or die.''

(+) Yeah! (+)

Cretaceous dinosaurs probably complained that "You didn't get all this egg-stealing during the good old Jurassic Period."

---

DeadBankerDream posted...

But that doesn't make crocodilians dinosaur descendants.

Am I being unclear somehow? I don't understand all this confusion.

Cousins, not descendants. Colloquially most people don't care about the difference.

Josiah_Is_Back posted...

Cousins, not descendants. Colloquially most people don't care about the difference.

I mean we're all cousins, just some more distant than others

---

Shablagoo posted...

Isnt it pretty much scientifically accepted that birds are descended from dinosaurs?

No, it is scientifically accepted that they ARE dinosaurs. Their closest relatives share many features with them such as feathers which became repurposed for the specialized flight intensive lifestyle.

DeadBankerDream posted...

But that doesn't make crocodilians dinosaur descendants.

Am I being unclear somehow? I don't understand all this confusion.

No, crocodilians are not dinosaurs.

I think the trouble you're having understanding this is because there is a disconnect between how the general public defaults to thinking of animals and how scientists actually classify them; scientists classify groups of organisms by their ancestry, not shared physical characteristics.

Crocodilians and dinosaurs belong to a group called the Archosaurs, which is one of the three major supergroups in which all living reptiles fall under, but the two groups belong to separate branches within the Archosaurs. Crocodilians are the last living members of the major Archosaur group called the Pseudosuchians. Many groups of these Pseudosuchians were prominent on earth in the late Triassic around the time that mammals, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs first appeared. However, after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event (that made dinosaurs and pterosaurs the dominant vertebrates on the land), the only Pseudosuchian group to end up surviving were the Crocodylomorphs. True crocodilians didn't appear until sometime in the Cretaceous.

---