Some say you never forget your first love. Psychologists might be able to provide some insight for or against this maxim’s veracity, but taking it for the moment at face value, we offer you a warning before proceeding: this blog post may well break your heart. Sorry.
But first, why do we tell myths like the ones about to be debunked below? Isn’t that just lying to ourselves, and shouldn’t we stop doing it? Well, briefly, the answer is that knowledge by itself is useless. We need to put it to use—indeed, that seems to be the survival edge unique to human evolution: we tell stories in order to formulate, communicate, and adapt behavior. Without mythology and folklore, we cannot put knowledge into any kind of useful action. That’s not to say that all mythology holds true, especially in the literal sense, or that scientists ought to regard folklore when drawing their conclusions. Quite to the contrary, science and folklore often make a bad match because science must practice strict objectivity, whereas folklore deals with the subjective complexities of human emotion (emotion literally means “to set in motion,” or in other words, to move us to action). Just as science attempts to use the human mind as a mirror for the physical world, myth uses the physical world as a mirror for the human mind. In this way, they’re opposite, and even if opposites attract, attraction alone doesn’t always result in stable relationships, does it? Metaphors aside, when people mistake folklore for science, and vice versa, we end up with . . . problems. However, as you read this debunking or separation of the folklore from the science, consider why you may have found a particular myth attractive or persuasive. Doing so may reveal your own motives, laying them bare for critical examination and separating the false folklore from the good and useful. Besides, as with any breakup, you may find yourself a wiser person by this experience.
So take heart, and forge onward! ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all! Do prepare yourself for the literal and objective, though, as appropriate for a science blog: the soap is about to hit the opera, so to speak.
Myths:
5. Dinosaurs lived with cavemen.
4. Dinosaurs roared (or tweeted, or quacked, etc.).
3. All dinosaurs had feathers (or its opposite, all dinosaurs had scales).
2. Dinosaurs died out in a cosmic cataclysm within the space of a few days, weeks, months, or years.
1. NO SPOILERS!
Final Thoughts and Works Cited
We’ll ease into the myth busting with a fairly easy one. This myth may have taken hold partly because as dinosaurs gained popularity and more storytellers began to write about them, they couldn’t write a complete and compelling story without human characters. Early classics of dinosaur literature such as The Land That Time Forgot or The Lost World juxtaposed the people of their day with dinosaurs-according-to-the-paleontology-of-their-day, but as the paleontology of our own genus started to kick into high gear with discoveries such as Java Man and the hoax Piltdown Man, authors began to concoct and inject the stereotypical caveman inspired by these findings into dinosaur stories instead. In reality, tens of millions of years separate the dinosaurs (at least the classic concept of them which excludes birds–more on that later) and humankind.
We know this in part because human nature makes us natural vandals. As organisms which rely on tool making for our survival, we work hard to alter our world to fit our needs. We’ve used mammoth bones for pokers, our scraping tools leave telltale scratches on bone as evidence of butchery, and even our habit of domesticating animals and plants can radically alter their bodies. The bones of the ancient dinosaurs do not bear marks of human butchery or other artificial alteration that happened before their burial; when we do find evidence of human alteration of dinosaur bones or other fossils, it’s pretty easy to determine those changes postdated the bone’s burial and fossilization. For example, nobody claims holes drilled into trilobites found at archaeological sites here in Utah represent interaction between people and living trilobites because the scratches in the holes show that it took painstaking labor with an antler drill to carve them out. The chitin of a living trilobite would yield to the drill with little effort, but not a well-permineralized, silicified fossil. Attention to such details clarifies which came first.
Then there’s that pesky line of evidence called stratigraphy. Human remains and artifacts simply do not occur in the same rock layers; though some proponents of the myth have claimed some sites preserve human artifacts among dinosaur bones, they routinely ignore or fail to produce enough detail to confirm those artifacts were buried with those bones, as in the case of some Pleistocene sites, instead of, say, natural redeposition. Case in point: the Stewart Museum’s collections hold human artifacts found at the famous Bone Cabin Quarry, sometimes among the dinosaur bones discovered there. These artifacts clearly date to the late 19th century based on several lines of evidence, including the style of the artifacts, their construction, the inclusion of leather still surviving in Wyoming’s modern environment, the degree and type of degradation, and so on. Does this constitute evidence that Wyoming cowboys had to dodge Allosaurus on a regular basis? Of course not, as debunked by too many other lines of evidence to name. What’s more, none of the artifacts occur in the same rock layer as the bones, or even under them: they occur only in the dirt recently redeposited above the bones. Models attempting to reconcile the myth with observed characteristics of stratigraphic layers do a poor job of accounting for such details and predicting new discoveries.
Moreover, considering the cosmopolitan distribution of dinosaurs AND humans, if we ever lived together, sites recording that co-occurrence would far outnumber those of, say, mammoths, which were limited to the northern half of the northern hemisphere. Even proponents of the myth have to admit that the so-called discoveries they tout as proof positive form the exception rather than the rule.
But what about the art? Doesn’t ancient temple X feature a sculpture of a Stegosaurus? Doesn’t a clay pot in such-and-such a museum resemble a Triceratops so closely that it even gets the number of toes right? How do you explain the pictograph of that pterosaur somewhere in Arizona or Utah? Easily: if the frequency and anatomical accuracy of artistic depictions of dinosaurs shows that humans have seen live dinosaurs, then logically the explosion of dinosaur art since the days of Waterhouse Hawkins and the Victorian Era demonstrates the population explosion of dinosaurs during the past 180 years. James Gurney simply had to have been drawing Dinotopia plein air with living subjects, including the dinosaurs! The Flintstones and The Jetsons must also therefore both accurately depict the living conditions in the United States during the 1960s—wow, what a difference between the lifestyles of the blue collar and the cubicle dweller!
Sarcasm aside, when a mode of thinking that relies so heavily on imagination develops a blind spot to it, the irony gets thick indeed. Unfortunately, using art as a line of evidence does result in such big blind spots and a lack of application across the board: if we must forget the human imagination long enough to consider art as strictly literal interpretation of one’s life and times, we must conclude that modern attempts to artistically reconstruct extinct species like dinosaurs ALSO represent a strictly literal interpretation of our life and times, resulting in nonsensical conclusions that the dinosaur population is not only thriving, it’s growing. But how do we explain that anatomical accuracy? Well, employing the converse of the cherry-picking logic defending the myth, if modern humans can use fossils to inspire reconstructive art, so too could ancient humans because they likewise had both fossils and imagination available to them. The historical record bears out the logic: Ute folklore described the aforementioned trilobites as water bugs well before encountering scientific descriptions of trilobites as oceanic arthropods, to name only one example (ask our docents about the historical dragon in our exhibit halls for another or check out our summer lecture series which addresses the relationships between fossils and myth). Besides presupposing our ancestors took things more literally than we do, using art as evidence presents a whole host of other problems we will have to save for another time—suffice it to say for now that subjective lines of evidence cannot apply to scientific conclusions, even if they may inspire scientific inquiry or if objective inquiry eventually comes to the same conclusion.
A critical appraisal of the notion that classic dinosaurs and primitive humans interacted sometime in the distant past turns up evidence against it and none in favor which can withstand scrutiny. Considering how a few organisms thought extinct since the Mesozoic have proven to have survived to the current day, like Ginkgo and Latimeria (coelacanth), it’s not impossible that humans have interacted with or may yet rediscover some sort of relict dinosaur, but so far nobody can make the case that we coexisted stick, and the odds ain’t good that’ll ever change. Besides, science ultimately doesn’t deal with possibilities, but rather realities which we can describe; possibility is the playground of folklore. Sorry, Alley Oop is “just” a comic strip, The Flinstones is “just” a cartoon show, and the original One Million Years B.C. is just a Raquel Welch flick to most people (though it remains a Ray Harryhausen flick to us nerds!).
Busting this myth hurts because the excited roars of toddlers when they enter the museum make the work worthwhile. Ah, but we have to go through with it and tell the science like it is: though we can’t know exactly what sounds dinosaurs made, we can deduct a few kinds of sounds based on fossil evidence, and unfortunately roars, tweets, and quacks aren’t among them.
Roaring, as exemplified in tigers and lions, requires a large, modified larynx, some strategy for producing resonance which usually involves bone, and often a specialized hyoid. While the term “roar” itself isn’t a technical term, it does play a technical role for many scientists, leading many to treat roaring as pretty much limited to mammals due to how they produce sound. Colloquially, the term roar refers to any loud, harsh bellow, so we sometimes refer to loud crocodile vocalizations as roaring even though they produce the sound by means radically different from how mammals approach a similar effect. Keep this in mind: to a scientist, how the animal produces the sound matters more than the effect.
Since so much of how animals vocalize depends on soft tissues, we lack a lot of data essential to figuring out the vocal capabilities of dinosaurs. We do get some: a number of crested hadrosaurs (lambeosaurines) had hollow crests which very likely acted as resonators and which scientists have tested acoustically. We also find dinosaur hyoid bones, albeit rarely. However, without the soft tissues, we cannot get a complete picture of dinosaur vocal capability, and since sound doesn’t fossilize, we cannot say anything about what calls they made. Comparisons with relatives suggest that dinosaurs didn’t use their voice boxes (larynges) to vocalize, but their ears and other lines of evidence suggest that many made low frequency calls capable of traveling long distances. A 1998 acoustical study of Parasaurolophus, one of the Park’s featured dinosaurs, examined a scenario which found it capable of using passages in its skull to create a virtual “air-reed” from turbulence, meaning that it didn’t need to use its larynx to produce a call, so at least some dinosaurs found acoustic communication important to their survival strategy, and that even if they ceased to use their larynges to produce vocalization, they developed alternative methods as needed—we just don’t know which ones needed to call out or, in most cases, have any means of figuring out how they did it.
One recent study reported on the larynx of an armored dinosaur, Saichania, which had become bony. It suggested that a bony larynx may indicate that it used an alternative means of producing its calls like how birds do. This led to oversimplified reports of dinosaurs tweeting, clucking, or quacking like various birds. The study is actually referring to the syrinx, an alternative means of vocalization developed by birds. The syrinx is an air sac located at the base of the trachea, and like many of the other air sacs in a bird’s respiratory system, parts of it invade bone, meaning that we can detect it in some fossil specimens. Well-preserved birds and small dinosaurs found in the same formation show that while the birds had some indication of syrinxes, the dinosaurs lacked them. Since the syrinx is therefore probably a bird invention, you can safely dismiss the notion of Tyrannosaurus clucking like a chicken or tweeting like a sparrow (and remember, dinosaurs do seem to have developed hearing geared for lower frequencies anyway). In the case of the Saichania study, a bony voice box most likely means that regardless of how it produced its voice, it could make it really, really loud. Rare ankylosaur hyoids support this idea. However, for all we can tell at this point, it just belched really loudly.
Such technicalities do not mean that those who say dinosaurs roar are committing cardinal scientific sin. Saying that dinosaurs roared doesn’t really misrepresent the science because what little we can know about dinosaur calls does fit that loose description: let the toddlers roar away all they want! But it is helpful to keep in mind that they wouldn’t sound like a lion or an elk, or even a lark or a goose. However they serenaded their sweethearts or bellowed their battle cries or kept their peace, currently available evidence suggests they likely did so in ways unique to them and which went extinct with them. If we were to describe those calls, we would probably have to invent new words: might I suggest, “rawr?”
In 2012, a spate of new dinosaur discoveries from China which preserved a halo of fuzz around some small dinosaurs culminated in the ultimate fuzzy dinosaur: the large tyrannosauroid Yutyrannus. The internet crowd went wild, proclaiming that Yutyrannus’ discovery clearly indicated the featheriness of that supreme icon of prehistory, Tyrannosaurus, and its closest kin. The myth persists today despite the fuzziness of the logic used to splice Yutyrannus fuzz onto its 45-60-million-year distant kin AND the oversight of an important statement that same Yutyrannus description made: “Gigantic tyrannosauroids have been suggested to lack an extensive feathery covering . . . . This interpretation derives some support from reported impressions of small patches of scaly skin, and there is certainly no direct fossil evidence for the presence of feathers in gigantic Late Cretaceous tyrannosauroids.” A 2017 study calculated the odds of finding a feathered or fuzzed Tyrannosaurus or Albertosaurus and found only a 2.6% chance—hardly a margin of error—compared to an 89-90% chance in more basal members the group. (It’s worth noting that the skin fossils for the more recent tyrannosaurids are more numerous and widely distributed within a smaller group, leading to better resolution and therefore greater reliability of the 2.6%; the original specimen of Santanaraptor, a Brazilian tyrannosauroid, preserves patches of bare skin and scales on its legs, thickening the plot even further.) Thus passes one of many, many chapters in the recent saga of the fuzzy dinosaur.
Of all the myths on this list, this one seems to typify the first couple of decades of the new millennium the most. Discoveries of fuzzy and feathered dinosaurs starting in the 1990s seem to have captured the imagination of many scientists and laypeople alike, even to the point that the excitement took on an inertia of its own. As with many cultural sea changes, the new momentum sparked a degree of backlash, and the myth slowly developed into a two-headed beast wherein all dinosaurs became fuzzy or feathered. Oh, these two parties could admit their preferred model had its outliers, but in practice, no amount of unscientific speculation could take things too far, leading to stegosaurs with feathered fans augmenting their plates and ‘raptors with crocodilian scales. Social media arguments on the subject could get nasty—some still do—with some parties tired of the fighting opting for a third model which pointed out the merits of both. In all cases, the conversation centered on the cultural value of the various positions and proceeded from the assumption that dinosaur skin could be feathered, scaly, or both, as if feathers and scales were the only options.
Fossil evidence shows that archosaurs—the group which comprises dinosaurs, birds, pterosaurs, crocodiles, and some other close relatives—had begun to develop innovations in their scale growth which led to a variety of new forms. Unfortunately, not only do the fossils preserve an incomplete record for studying details which could clarify the evolutionary development, and thus the nature of these novel skin structures, but our concepts of feathers and scales need to catch up to the new data. Science does not currently have a clear definition of feathers which can account for the new explosion of weird skin fossils, and many scientists do not address their interpretation of them with enough nuance. The Yutyrannus description, for example, proclaims the animal bore feathers without explaining how the term applies to the fossils, yet simultaneously admitting that the fossils lack enough resolution to determine their exact anatomy beyond calling them definitely filamentous (hairlike or threadlike). A study published just last week even suggests that use of the term “feather” when describing dinosaur fuzz may come down to a researcher’s personal preference simply because it may prove impossible to account for all the exceptions and transitions dinosaurs produced on the way to what we know as feathers on modern birds, for all the good that does anyone. However, detailed examinations of these new fossils do make clear that despite the flaws in our terminology, dinosaurs as a large and highly diverse group grew a variety of skin coverings including scales, feathers, and a whole category of “stuff we’ve never seen before,” with the latter two less common than the former. A 2015 study repeated in 2020 used statistics and a large data set of known dinosaur skin fossils to determine that most dinosaurs grew scales, with what we might term “true feathers” in the modern sense limited to derived coelurosaurs (ornithomimosaurs and dinosaurs more birdlike than they), and with the earliest dinosaurs most likely bearing scales. Further, the 2020 study found that the burden of evidence needed to determine most dinosaurs produced some kind of fuzz or feather requires the discovery of filaments on Triassic skin fossils of a bird-hipped dinosaur, a theropod, and a sauropodomorph. Since then, scale fossils have been reported for Plateosaurus, a Triassic sauropodomorph similar to the Massospondylus featured at the Park. If most dinosaurs were indeed scaly, it explains how the history of dinosaur paleontology would draw preliminary conclusions they all bore scales, but recent discoveries prevent us from saying so anymore.
Genetic and developmental evidence thicken the plot even further. Crocodiles have a complete genetic toolbox for producing feathers, but they use it to produce scales instead. Introducing certain hormones at certain points in embryonic crocodilian development has successfully caused them to grow fuzz from their developing scutes. Together with the fossil evidence, it’s fair to say that any dinosaur group was equipped to produce skin coverings other than scales, but in most cases they opted to stick with scales for reasons just as mysterious as the reasons some of them sprouted fuzz, feathers, and associated whatchamacallit. Many scientists have long suspected the shift to filaments had something to do with a need for insulation, but filaments have so many uses and have sprouted independently in so many different types of organisms that we can’t be sure of even that.
None of this gives license for filling the gaps in our knowledge with speculation—artists shouldn’t put feathers on their Brachiosaurus drawings if they intend to represent the current state of the science on that taxon, for example—but it does incentivize new discovery and close, objective scrutiny of whatever skin fossils we turn up in the future. Chances are that we will find things stranger than feathers among the dinosaurs of deep time!
Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs? Well, we found the crater, we have a fossil site (nicknamed Tanis) which seems to record that event and even yields enough evidence to argue that it happened in the springtime, and we have a worldwide layer of iridium—a metal common in asteroids but not on Earth—deposited at the same time. Seems like a smoking gun, right? And doesn’t that evoke the image of the asteroid dropping thousands of species instantly, like they were hit by a bullet? Though many scientists are now certain the Chicxulub (chick-shoo-lube) asteroid impact played a prominent role in the mass extinction that eliminated the dinosaurs, we still don’t know everything about how it happened. It was an almost unprecedented event in the inner solar system since the planets cooled enough to have rocky crusts capable of recording impact events, and it has no subsequent equal, so whatever we know about it comes from models that we can’t check easily or reliably against other impact events—a perennial apples-and-oranges situation. Moreover, we do have reason to believe that other factors like unusually high volcanic activity played a part as well. The dramatic image of a fiery cataclysm wiping out Earth’s mightiest animals has a cinematic sort of appeal, but several facts of mass extinction and numerous lines of evidence stand in its way.
First, consider what extinction is: a state where the death rate of a species exceeds its birth rate long enough for all members of the species to die out. Just as death is a part of life, so too is extinction, and it happens all the time even though it fluctuates in factors like the rate of die off and the variety of species it effects. Mass extinction affects multiple species over a discreet time period, with some events large enough to leave a geological record, and some even larger events leaving a global geological record. Now, because survival is the ultimate goal of life, every species is equipped for survival. Life for individuals is fragile, life for species not so much, but taken in all its startling variety, life on earth in its totality has proven remarkably tough. It has lasted for over a billion years despite several staggering worldwide losses of more than 50% of species variety in a given time period. Global mass extinction therefore comes about as the result of a variety of events that thwart a variety of survival strategies long enough to make a mark on the fossil record. Those events may represent a domino effect stemming from a single main source, but whatever the initial event might be, it has to produce a variety of effects.
Second, have you noticed from the preceding paragraph that time plays an integral role? Mass extinction does not happen quickly due to the variety of pressures that come into play on communities of species verses their continued efforts to survive. By definition, extinction has to be a multi-generational event. Sure, extinction could happen quickly if something nasty enough happened to kill many species quickly, but that also ignores the counterintuitive third fact that extinction events are also about survival. During an event that killed off pterosaurs, mosasaurs, and ammonites, the population of sea turtles—those poster species of conservation movements due to the sensitivity of their reproduction strategies—actually INCREASED a little. Perhaps fewer pterosaurs and birds helped out the sea turtles, but given similarities of reproductive strategy among these groups, whatever event exerted enough pressure to wipe out pterosaurs and decimate birds had to have missed sea turtles almost completely.
Because mass extinction also tells stories of survival, the fossil record preserves rates of heightened diversification concurrent with elevated rates of die off. As dying species vacate their ecological niches, other organisms scramble to take advantage of the new opportunities left by the vacuum. The most recent mass extinction event, the Ice Age, saw the fall of giant reptiles like Laophis and Megalochelys (featured at the Park), the mighty megalodon shark, and our more chimp-like cousins the australopithecines, sure, but it also saw the rise and fall of wooly mammoths, wooly rhinos, and saber cats, and it saw the continued rise of pronghorn, dandelions, pumpkins, and our own genus, Homo. We have a harder time measuring just exactly how the fall of the dinosaurs gave rise to the age of mammals thanks to 66 million years’ worth of lost evidence and some geological quirks which mask that immediate time period. For example, the relative abundance of data about the relatively recent 2-million-year span of the Pleistocene era, wherein we can measure ages to with a few centuries to a few thousand years, could and often does get mathematically swallowed up by the comparative distance of the Maastrictian age of the Late Cretaceous, wherein 2 million years is more like a margin of error. We can know that it took roughly 5,000 to 7,000 years for the woolly mammoth to go completely extinct, but we cannot say how long it took for Tyrannosaurus rex. Even if the Chicxulub impact and the associated volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps of India worked on dinosaurs faster than that, what we know of mass extinction in general strongly suggests it took longer than a few years.
Of course, that’s applying general models, which scientists prefer not to do if they can help it; what does the evidence itself say? Again, not much because the geology isn’t as helpful as we might like, but we do find fragmentary dinosaur fossils above the point of the Chicxulub impact—a tooth here, a rib there, no substantially complete skeletons. So far scientists have not managed to eliminate alternative explanations for those outliers, such as redeposition or the aforementioned margins of error pinpointing dates that far back. Nevertheless, the data at least fit the general model.
Naturally, scientists have spanned entire careers examining extinction events like this one, so a single post can’t cover all the relevant data. Hopefully the information relayed here illustrates how mind-bogglingly complex mass extinction gets, and hopefully it provokes some questions. Maybe this myth still has some life left in it, giving it the benefit of the doubt, but the magnitude of the doubt ought to make us think twice before accepting it outright. The next time you’re tempted to picture a tsunami of flame rapidly consuming the globe, incinerating all the species we know went extinct, ask yourself how dragonflies survived it virtually unchanged. What could kill off all varieties of ammonite but not the nautilus? Why do we now have so many pines when we have only one surviving species of ginkgo? When it comes to the dinosaurs, consider this: recent examinations of dinosaur eggs discovered that even the fast-growing ones like troodontids spent reptilian amounts of time in the egg before hatching. Birds abandoned many aspects of reptilian reproduction, putting their young on a fast-track to hatching at the expense of extended parental protection until they can fend for themselves, speaking in general terms. Of course, given how well reptiles weathered the K-T extinction, slow hatching alone can’t account for the dinosaurs’ demise, but whatever selection pressures asteroids or volcanoes or whatever placed upon them, slower growth in the egg likely became a liability in that context. It probably played a decisive role in birds’ survival, given what’s coming up in the final myth.
WHAT?!?! Well, okay, you may have heard this before, but it’s true . . . from a certain point of view and filtered through some semantic tweaks. That point of view is called cladistic phylogenetics: the use of cladistic mathematic techniques to model probable evolutionary scenarios. Some people call it charting the history of evolution on Earth, but its limitations (especially in paleontology) mean we have to take its results as approximations at best. Nevertheless, modern scientists regard it as a standard technique for exploring and to some degree testing hypothetical evolutionary relationships between taxa. Phylogeny groups organisms based on shared derived characteristics, which are features developed by the ancestor species of a given group, called a clade, and shared by most of the members of that group. I say “most” because really inclusive, older clades often include member species which have eliminated certain features, but we can usually get around that if we can trace a suite of features through a well-established lineage. In terms of history, since your grandma will always be your grandma, in this historical sense species don’t outgrow their ancestry—by the same token, in a practical or phenotypical sense, since you’re not your grandma’s clone, you absolutely do outgrow your ancestry just by looking different in some way, but we’ll get into that later. The way that cladistics tends to order things (and the older Linnean system too, for that matter) resembles a set of matryoshka dolls: less inclusive clades nest within larger ones.
Here’s where we need to get careful with semantics. In scientific parlance, the clade aves nests within the clade dinosauria. To subdivide it further, paleognaths and neognaths (together comprising modern birds, defined by variations in jaw design) nest within pygostilia (a larger clade which includes toothy birds with claws, like Confuciusornis here at the Park, defined by having a characteristically stubby birdy tail), which in turn nests within maniraptora (defined by that half-moon-shaped bone in the wrist, the radiale, made famous by the Jurassic Park movie), which in turn nests within therapoda, which nests within dinosauria. Of course, that second summary skips a whole bunch of clades, but that’s to illustrate how new features and specific evolutionary events give rise to cladogenesis, a.k.a speciation, or the variety of life we can observe in nature, and do that without getting pedantic. By the time we get to the maniraptora clade, it includes what scientists generally call “non-avian” dinosaurs, and here we run into a semantic problem.
Cladistics considers monophyletic groupings natural, or in other words, if an ancestral species gives rise to a clade, all of its descendants belong in the clade, no exceptions. According to this schema, we can’t sensibly talk about dinosaurs without including all descendants of the primal dinosaurian ancestor, and that has to include birds. It doesn’t matter how different birds are from other members of the clade, when talking about the clade, parlance demands that we ignore derived features unique to birds (at least among dinosaurs) like laying one egg at a time—yes, dinosaurs laid two at a time, like many other egg-laying reptiles—a wishbone that bends (other dinosaurs’ wishbones were made to resist bending), powered flight and the shoulders to go with it, and the aforementioned syrinx to name a few. In some important practical, morphological, even taxonomic ways, birds are NOT dinosaurs, and so in order to address dinosaurs in a way that excludes birds and their exceptional features, scientists have generally adopted the workaround “non-avian dinosaurs.”
What does all this labyrinthine taxonomic play with jargon mean? Well, many scientists (over)simplify these findings to mean “birds are dinosaurs.” The linguistic mistake in doing so would merit another blog post, but for brevity’s sake, to preserve the nesting logic of cladistics in the translation from jargon into everyday English, we ought to call birds a group of dinosaurs. By the same token birds are also a group of reptiles . . . and a group of fish. So are we. Don’t believe me? Well, you have bones, don’t you? So do birds, and dinosaurs, and frogs and lizards and cows and sheep and foxes and tuataras and . . . you get the idea. Fish invented those, and since we have that feature as well, we belong in the bony fish clade (variously called osteichthyes or euteleostomi) We even have gills, although we don’t use them for breathing. The last remnant of gills left in the human design is the spiracle, also called the Eustachian tube, and it helps you pop your ears when their air pressure changes dramatically. Of course, all this makes sense under a phylogenetic point of view, but it makes precious little sense in other ways—I doubt anybody reading this will attempt to breathe underwater and risk drowning on the basis of their taxonomic placement as a bony fish. So while it’s TECHNICALLY true that dinosaurs survived the Mesozoic, remember that this is an oversimplification and a bit of a semantic manipulation: ONE GROUP of dinosaurs survived the Mesozoic because they had changed so much from the other dinosaur groups that Extinction “considered” them a different type of animal for all practical intents and purposes. What we consider dinosaurs in a colloquial, exclusive, phylogenetically messy PARAPHYLETIC sense died a slow death in terms of human history but a quick death in terms of geologic time. See? SO VERY MUCH depends on what point of view you choose to speak from!
Myriad examples similar to these myths run the length and breadth of the interwebs, some of which seem pretty compelling at first glance, especially since some take inspiration directly from science. The key to sifting the wheat from the chaff, metaphorically speaking, lies in a sound understanding of the nature of the evidence and what it can tell us—or in other words, by keeping firmly in mind what point of view a claim uses to make its point. Anyone can take a few facts in isolation and concoct an explanation which seems to make sense; the hallmark of science is in how it uses logical deduction and experimentation to check explanations against the physical world. Keep an open mind, but test everything you get as rigorously as you can. Examine the reasons you find one story or another compelling and trace them back to your motives for accepting them. If those motives rely on a collection of physical evidence, you’re working from a scientific point of view. If they rely more on feeling or utility, welcome to the folklore point of view. If you keep them clear and distinct from one another, both can play a role in your intellectual toolbox; as you use them, just remember how mistaking a drill for a hammer can cause
. . . problems. Nobody wants intellectual . . . problems.
To be posted soon–stay tuned!
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