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Birds were therefore the only dinosaur lineage to survive the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event approximately 66 million years ago. Dinosaurs can be divided into avian dinosaurs (birds) and non-avian dinosaurs, which are all dinosaurs other than birds. Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.
The study of these "great fossil lizards" soon became of great interest to European and American scientists, and in 1842 the English paleontologist Sir Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur", using it to refer to the "distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles" that were then being recognized in England and around the world.
Sauropsida (Greek for "lizard faces") is a clade of amniotes, broadly equivalent to the class Reptilia, though typically used in a broader sense to also include extinct stem-group relatives of modern reptiles and birds (which, as theropod dinosaurs, are nested within reptiles as more closely related to crocodilians than to lizards or turtles). [2]
Cladistically birds are considered reptiles, but according to traditional taxonomy they are listed separately. Saurischia includes extinct relatives of birds, the "lizard hipped" dinosaurs. [81] [82] See List of bird genera.
Modern diapsids (lizards, snakes, crocodilians, birds) excrete uric acid, which can be excreted as a paste, resulting in low water loss as opposed to a more dilute urine. It is reasonable to suppose that archosaurs (the ancestors of crocodilians, dinosaurs and pterosaurs) also excreted uric acid, and therefore were good at conserving water.
That part of the leg, the scientists said, allows birds to twist and turn like dinosaurs did tens of millions of years ago. The “fibular reduction” has helped penguins to waddle and turkeys to ...
There was once a thriving group of reptiles that lived during the time of the dinosaurs. Rhynchocephalia is a reptile order that evolved around 240 million years ago. These reptiles used to live ...
The saurischian hip structure led Seeley to name them "lizard-hipped" dinosaurs, because they retained the ancestral hip anatomy also found in modern lizards and other reptiles. He named ornithischians "bird-hipped" dinosaurs because their hip arrangement was superficially similar to that of birds, though he did not propose any specific ...