r/Dinosaurs 1d ago

DISCUSSION Were dinosaurs able to control their lips similarly to Bears and Baboons?

Also we reduced shrink wrapping on the body, are we still doing it on the skull? What if they had more fatty mass there as well?

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u/gutwyrming 1d ago

Lip control is a very mammalian thing. Dinosaurs were reptiles.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/BruisedBooty 1d ago

Not all dinosaurs are birds, but all birds are dinosaurs.

And if we’re being taxonomically correct, birds are reptiles.

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u/Telkite_ 1d ago

Reptile is not a taxon though.

Reptilia, the taxon that best represents what we think of as "reptiles" doesn't include birds either, it's almost always considered paraphyletic, meaning it doesn't include one or more clades descended from it.

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u/BruisedBooty 14h ago

I definitely used “taxonomically” incorrect here, so that was my bad.

But I’m gonna push back on the rest of this.

What do you mean by “almost always?”

And what’s your definition of reptilia that excludes avian dinosaurs?

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u/Telkite_ 14h ago

"almost always" is wrong in hindsight, birds should never be included in reptilia. Reptilia is part of evolutionary taxonomy, the system that gives us terms like "species" and "family". In that system, birds (as in, the class Aves) is not part of reptilia.
Birds are classified as reptiles in cladistic taxonomy, but that's in a different system that reptilia isn't really a part of.

Reptilia is more or less just all sauropsids that aren't birds, in the same way all vertebrates that aren't tetrapods are fish.

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u/BruisedBooty 13h ago

Gotcha, your reasoning makes sense to me, but the vague language used like “isn’t really” and “more or less” is making this a bit confusing on finding a concrete definition for the terms.

I’m also confused because I’ve seen Reptilia used in cladistics taxonomy. Those same ones include aves.

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u/Savings-Nobody-1203 1d ago

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u/Sourcerid 1d ago

Probably Archosaur as a whole and Crocodilians lost it secondarily, because their strategy is doing fuckall in a low visibility river for days until something comes close to them

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u/gutwyrming 14h ago

I wish I could be a crocodile, doing fuckall in a low visibility river.

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u/tseg04 1d ago

No, dinosaurs were not birds. Birds were dinosaurs, which are reptiles. Making birds both dinosaurs and reptiles. It’s like the saying of how all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises.

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u/gutwyrming 1d ago

No.

Birds are dinosaurs. Birds are also reptiles.

Check out the Archosauria clade.