Are humans apes? Are dogs wolves? Are birds dinosaurs?

Post Reply New Topic

Reptiles are a huge group. Its been long known that the two closest living cousins of the dinosaurs are the crocs and alligators (on one hand), and the birds (on the other).

But in the last 20 some years some scientists say that dinosaurs are SO closely related to dinosaurs that for practical purpose living birds are a type of dinosaur. In fact living birds can be thought of as "miniaturized dinosaurs highly specialized for flight" in the same way that bats are mammals specialized for flight. Or so fossil scientists say.

Maybe yes. Maybe no.

Dinosaur scientists are the ones who proclaim that. But bird scientists resist the "birds are dinosaurs" bandwagon. But even that's a difference of degree not of kind. Bird scientists still classify birds as being part of one branch of the reptile family tree that includes both dinosaurs, and the crocs/alligators, and admit that birds are as close to dinosaurs as are crocodiles (which is pretty close for any living animal). Siblings to dinosaurs, if not one and the same as dinosaurs.

Seconded.

That family tree does indeed lay it out well. Both how the critters are related, and how feathers evolved, and how feather evolution correlates with the how the critters evolved.

There are too many differences between monkeys and apes for them to be classified together, in my opinion.

It is obvious, to the casual observer, that monkeys are not apes--and are never referred to as such.

Interestingly, though, in the not-so-distant past, many apes have been called "monkeys' in casual conversation.

Many times, in my experience, all non-human "higher" primates were referred to as "monkeys" by many people up until about the 1970s.

"Monkey" was the default term, in the "common culture" pre-1970, for a human-like, non-human primate.

Can people stop saying one species is classified some way "scientifically" as if it made their opinion absolute fact? There are multiple systems of classification and disagreements about where to put one species or another and most of the scientists suggesting something have scientific reasons. When you have a ton of species that are related it gets hard to draw absolute lines and these classifications exist exclusively to make it easier for us to understand. From a purely objective perspective there is no absolute line between one species and the similar species that came before it and claiming your preferred place to draw the line is "scientifically true" in some objective sense doesn't work. It's like insisting to a Spanish person that they're wrong to call a door a "puerta" because it's scientifically a door.

All wolves are dogs, not all dogs are wolves...I think. Also hyenas are not dogs or wolves, I find that interesting I always figured they were a sort of dog, then again never looked into it but found out on a documentary.

Also for people on the 'humans aren't apes' bandwagon...well we are primates so its either apes or monkeys, monkeys usually have tails, therefore we must be apes.

[quote="Sweetleaf"]All wolves are dogs, not all dogs are wolves...I think.quote]

you're talking about the "family" level of classification. The rest of us are talking about the species level.

The domestic dog is a vertebrate (subphylum), of the class mammalia, of the carnivore order, of the dog "family". A family that includes jackals, and foxes. So the domestic dog IS a member of the larger umbrella called "the dog family". But dogs only became a "thing" when some population of wolves started hanging out with our cave man ancestors in the Ice Age a couple of tens of thousands of years ago. So in essence modern domestic dogs are all a domestic subspecies of wolves. So - the answer to that particular question is "yes". Dogs are wolves (are a part of the wolf species). That even though both wolves and dogs are part of the larger "dog" family.

Even scientists thought that hyenas were in the dog family (they hunt in packs like wolves) until the late 20th century when the consensus changed when they realized that hyenas are actually more related to the cat family (both the dog and the cat family are related when you go back far enough).