u/Syncategory

"“There is still a lot left of the season,” said Hunter Bell. “I haven’t done a paced 800m yet, I have one coming up with the speedy girls. I am really excited to throw my hat into the ring there. Had a bit of fomo when I saw them on the podium. It’s such an exciting time. I am really happy.”

There are some who believe that a fast-paced 800m in Zurich could get close to the world record of 1min 53.28sec, set in 1983 by the Czech Jarmila Kratochvilova, especially with the Swiss star Werro having run 1:53.80 this season – the third fastest in history. "

I am not the maker of this Kickstarter or in any way affiliated with it; I learned about it here, got really excited about it and backed it already, and really want this to happen. The art looks amazing.

I used to think that Cuvier was the one who first identified dinosaur bones as those of reptiles, but according to Wikipedia, it seems that he did so for pterosaurs, and it was Buckland who first scientifically described a non-avian dinosaur as a reptile.

These days, we know that "reptile" is very problematic as a group description, because the lay definition distinguishes them from birds, while the common-ancestor definition requires that any group that has both dinosaurs and lizards/snakes/turtles includes birds as well.

What I am wondering is why the early naturalists and palaeontologists identified dinosaurs as closer to lizards and snakes than they were to birds. They were smart people. What bones did they actually have access to, and what traits were they looking at that made them go, "reptile"?

(I would guess teeth being one. No bird they knew had teeth. And dinosaur teeth were not of varying shape and function like mammal teeth. But why reptile and not "a new class that's neither bird nor mammal nor reptile"?)

If we had realized 200 years earlier that dinosaurs were bird ancestors, we could have been spared so many decades of misrepresenting them as sluggish, cold-blooded, stupid, having to live in water to maintain their weight, etc.