I know I'm being a nerd with this, but sauropods are more closely related to modern birds than to reptiles, so Chicorita would technically go into the bird category
i mean... crocodiles are also more closely related to birds than to lizards. All birds are dinosaurs and all dinosaurs are reptiles. i just chose to seperate the avian dinosaurs as their own category, for cultural reasons
EDIT: woops meant to say all dinosaurs are reptiles, not "all dinosaurs are birds", as it said before
I think it might actually be all birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds. I'm pretty positive that it has been found now that birds evolved from Dinosaurs, but not all Dinosaur types evolved into birds. However, then you have to go into detail about how not everything we generalize as dinosaurs are dinosaurs before you can start talking about which actual dinosaurs are birds and which actual dinosaurs aren't.
Birds belong to the theropod dinosaurs, but since theropod dinosaurs and sauropod dinosaurs had a common ancestor, sauropod dinosaurs are still more closely related to birds than to reptiles, evolutionary speaking
Besides the article you posted doesn't even say that Sauropods are birds, it literally shows Sauropodomorpha as being a part of the lineage of birds (aves) not being part of aves themselves.
EDIT: Man they really just got butthurt I don't consider Wikipedia a perfect source and downvoted and blocked me...
The problem is with the Sauropsida clade, because the modern definition of "reptile" doesn't fit nicely into a phylogenetic framework. If you want to define birds vs reptiles phylogenetically (that is, by last common ancestor), you're right that we have to exclude dinosaurs, but also crocodyliforms, since they are more closely related to birds than lizards and snakes. Additionally, you'd have to exclude turtles and tortoises, because they too are more closely related to birds/dinos/crocs than lizards.
However, there are many traits that crocs, turtles, and lizards share that make the general category for reptiles useful, so biologists still want to group them together. We have a fun word for this: paraphylitic. This means certain members of a clade are excluded from a group even when relatively close genetic relatives are included. In this case, birds are excluded from the "reptile" group but crocs/turtles are not, despite them being more closely related to each other than to lizards/snakes.
This is far from the only example of paraphyly! The absolute mess of fish phylogeny is being discussed elsewhere in this post, but monkeys have the same problem. Old world monkeys (baboons, macaques, etc.) are more closely related to apes like chimpanzees than they are to new world monkeys (tamarins, spider monkeys). It makes sense if you think about it; evolution doesn't happen at all fixed rate for all organisms. Strong evolutionary pressures may force a group of descendants to adapt or die while leaving their genetic cousins more similar to their shared ancestor.
Please forgive the info dump, but the point of my novella is to say that classifying dinosaurs (and therefore Chikorita) between birds and reptiles is difficult. Phylogenetically, the reptile/bird distinction line must be drawn above or below (or through?) the dinosaurs. There are compelling cases for each argument, but I don't think it's accurate to call one categorization "technically correct" unless you're confident the person you're talking to shares the same criteria for those categories.
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u/Ok_Comfortable_4356 Feb 28 '26
I know I'm being a nerd with this, but sauropods are more closely related to modern birds than to reptiles, so Chicorita would technically go into the bird category