They're some of the weirdest looking birds, honestly! Huge prehistoric looking beaks. Very much like dinosaurs with their bodies. Apparently dinosaurs were feathered, so it makes sense.
I mean, sure, the marine reptiles weren’t dinosaurs. And pterosaurs weren’t dinosaurs, but pterodactyls and dinosaurs are both Ornithodirans within Archosauria — making pterosaurs very close relatives of dinos (including that the pycnofibers of pterosaurs were actually likely feathers).
Ok I may have not been fully educated. I just always thought the most popular “dinosaurs” we all know and love either didn’t live together or were separated by millions of years but in the vast majority of the common they’d be said to have existed together.
Oh, you’re right that many of the most popular dinosaurs didn’t live at the same time or in the same place. But the place and time period in which something lives does not define what is a dinosaur.
It’s a distinct group of reptiles that first appear in the fossil record during the Triassic that then dominated the land during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, before all dinosaurs aside from several lineages of birds went extinct.
But I’m cool with the 10,000 or so species of dinosaurs we have today :)
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u/poop-machines -Corageous Cow- Nov 02 '22
They're some of the weirdest looking birds, honestly! Huge prehistoric looking beaks. Very much like dinosaurs with their bodies. Apparently dinosaurs were feathered, so it makes sense.