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Originally Posted by Staiduk
Another myth that really took off after Jurrassic Park - that dinos were birds.
Forget it. They weren't birds - they shared birdlike qualities and certainly some species of dinosaur shared a root ancestor with birds; but keep in mind that birds existed simultaneously with dinosaurs.
Saying dinos are birds is like saying Humans are shrews. (No jokes...  )
Another myth yet - ant this is the biggest one - is that here was one type of animal called 'dinosaur'. There wasn't. 'Dinosaurs' were not one particular type of animal with widely-varying body types; they were an entirely different class of creature. I think it's safer to think in terms of a completely different classification - somewhere between kingdom and phylum - for the creatures rather than trying to fit them into the 'lizard' category or some such. |
Not a myth, sorry. According to modern cladistic taxonomy, birds are dinosaurs, because it's impossible to construct an evolutionary tree for all types of dinosaur that doesn't include birds as well, just as it's impossible to construct an evolutionary tree for all types of ape that doesn't include us.
OK. Dino civilisation. One of my favourite fringe ideas I have to say, mainly because I love dinos and I think they deserved their civilisation. Why should only the wussy mammals get one?
Most of the points raised here are hard to argue with. Of course, we probably would have found SOME evidence of an advanced dinosaur intelligence, such as worked flints, since we're able to locate their nests etc. BUT...
fossilisation is a very rare event, and only occurs under very specific circumstances. Plus, fossils are only preserved in very specific locations. One of the prerequisites of being fossilised is that you have to be very stupid (for instance, falling into quicksand), so it seems unlikely that an intelligent creature would end up fossilised.
If the civilisation cremated their dead, they would only be present in the geological record as ash.
Most of what we call civilisation (the monumental skyline of manhattan etc) would be unidentifiable crushed rock within 65 million years. Any of their archeological finds would be buried deep.
But in the end I think the NO camp wins out, because of the lack of worked flints and because there was no evidence by the end of the dino's reign that anything close to human intelligence was in the offing. Which is a shame.