5 Animals That Aren't Dinosaurs
If you get most of your information about ancient animals from vintage cartoons or action figures, then a lot of things that you think of as "dinosaurs" actually weren't. Learn about the definition...
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So nature is crazy. Go back a couple hundred million years, and you’ll find animals that, by today’s standards, break all the rules. Animals that looked like fish but couldn’t breathe in water. Reptiles that gave birth to live young instead of laying eggs. Creatures the size of giraffes … that could fly. When we started discovering fossils of animals like these hundreds of years ago, we lumped them together in our textbooks. By the mid 1800s, we had a word for them: “dinosaurs,” Greek for “terrible lizards.” And for a long time, anything that was weird and extinct and vaguely reptilian was called a dinosaur -- even though scientists were finding that they actually weren’t that closely related to each other. We don’t classify orga...
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So nature is crazy. Go back a couple hundred million years, and you’ll find animals that, by today’s standards, break all the rules. Animals that looked like fish but couldn’t breathe in water. Reptiles that gave birth to live young instead of laying eggs. Creatures the size of giraffes … that could fly. When we started discovering fossils of animals like these hundreds of years ago, we lumped them together in our textbooks. By the mid 1800s, we had a word for them: “dinosaurs,” Greek for “terrible lizards.” And for a long time, anything that was weird and extinct and vaguely reptilian was called a dinosaur -- even though scientists were finding that they actually weren’t that closely related to each other. We don’t classify orga...
