Chickens are constantly called living dinosaurs. Why aren’t Bats, Snakes, Apes ,Turtles…mostly all animals called living dinosaurs if there were versions of that same animal walking the earth millions of years ago?

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Chickens are constantly called living dinosaurs. Why aren’t Bats, Snakes, Apes ,Turtles…mostly all animals called living dinosaurs if there were versions of that same animal walking the earth millions of years ago?

In: Biology

14 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because birds are theropods, a type of dinosaur.

Bats are mammals, not dinosaurs. Apes are mammals too.

Turtles are anapsids.

Snakes are diapsids and so are birds. However, they are separate subcategories of diapsid. Birds are just the only extant animals within the dinosaur subcategory.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not everything that lived during the time of dinosaurs were dinosaurs. Mammals and other types of animals did exist alongside dinosaurs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Dinosaurs are a specific animal that lived a long time ago. Not all animals that lived in the time of the dinosaurs, were dinosaurs.

Chicken come from dinosaurs. These animals you listed come from other animals that lived long ago

Anonymous 0 Comments

Others have already pointed out most of the explanation, but let me try to add something that may have been missed.

You seem to be confusing two different terms people sometimes use the term “living fossil” to describe types of animal that a barely seem to have changed in appearance for millions of years.

Chicken are not usually considered living fossils.

A completely different idea is concept of dinosaurs.

The definition of dinosaurs includes all descendants of the first dinosaur. Birds are in that category.

When scientist want to talk about just the dinosaurs that people normally think of as dinosaurs they say “non-avian dinosaurs”. “aves” means bird, so that means “non-bird dinosaurs”.

Since chicken are birds and birds are dinosaurs and chicken are alive, chicken can be called living dinosaurs.

The ancestor of modern chicken that was around when all the other dinosaurs went extinct looked enough like living fowls to be recognizable as such but not similar enough to justify calling chicken living fossils.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Easy. You can only use chicken meat to make dinosaur-shaped nuggets. Hence, dinosaur descendants.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The mighty Chicken is the closest living relative to the lowly Tyrannosaurus Rex, believe it or not

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the other answers did not make this explicit, I want to point out that chickens being descended from dinosaurs also means they *literally are* dinosaurs. Dinosaurs weren’t a thing that ended. They are the group of organisms which share a particular common ancestor, and chickens qualify exactly as much as ankylosaurs or utahraptors.

When people say chickens are dinosaurs, they’re not just being cute, they’re being completely accurate.

If this is at all confusing, it’s the same as how we say humans are apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, eukaryotes, etc. We are all these things. They are just categories at different levels of grouping. Like how Paris is in France and Europe and on Earth all at once.