There's a kind of mental exhaustion specifically linked to being on social media. I'm hoping that this lumbering dinosaur site will prove a safer, calmer place in the end than the Hitchcock nightmare of the birdsite...
@joannechocolat Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, it is my sad duty to inform you that mastodons are not dinosaurs ... but birds are! So Twitter is the dinosaur site.
Am I right in thinking that birds are not in the sauropod clade?
My engineering education was rather remiss in this area
@ParkinJim @joannechocolat Yes, you're right. Waaay back amniotes split into the mammal line and the reptile line. Mastodons are among the mammals. Over on the other branch, reptiles begat dinosaurs. Among the dinosaurs are the sauropods and the carnivorous theropods. And birds are theropods.
So birds are closer to sauropods than they are to mammals, but they are not themselves sauropods.
I was talking to Dad about scientific progress, and he mentioned reading about plate tectonics in New Scientist, as (almost literally) groundbreaking addition to make Continental drift theory the scientifically accept theory.
Similarly with what I learned about dinosaurs at primary school in the 1979s
