David Attenborough talks about the evolution of birds, what classifies a bird, where do we draw the line between dinosaurs and birds (he even talks about this elephant bird) in the first episode of Life of Birds [1]. Also, watch the whole documentary if you're interested.
The Aristotelian taxonomy was even worse with things like considering beaver a type of fish and poultry as distinct from meat because meat is land animals.
Common names are even worse for it which is why the current lineial system exists in the first place like all of the different names for mountain lion. Taxonomy isn't objective science in itself (although it should be based off of it to be of any use) but it is very useful to science.
Technically we can reindex the taxonomy and rename any time but it would be such a pain to keep track with multiple systems old and new and all of the controversies that it probably wouldn't be worth it until our understand diverges enough that it loses all meaningfulness.
For instance the classical elements of various systems were discarded completely as useless even as an additional layered category. Fire is a state of matter, earth is actually composed of many of the table of elements even more if we don't have metal separate, water is composed of two different elements that appear elsewhere in both air and earth. And the old associations like gold with fire and sun? Completely unfounded. Thus it is pretty much useless as a tool for improving our understanding and limited to a motif.
Meanwhile even if DNA testing shows that the line of descent doesn't match up at all reliably with parallel evolution the organization could still be good for rough body shape for instance. Even if to give a counterfactual and deliberately absurd example it later turns out that humans actually evolved directly from an extinct strain of whale filing humanity among apes is still informative in morphology and not wrong in that sense even if the descent aspect was shockingly discreditted.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/the-bi...
https://hubpages.com/animals/Comparing-the-Moa-and-The-Eleph...
Might these be recent enough to bring back?
>The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback has set ambitious goals to hatch the first generation of new Passenger Pigeons before 2025 and begin trial wild releases in the following 15 years. http://reviverestore.org/projects/the-great-passenger-pigeon...
I hope so. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/740592...
The zoo at this point were just recording the last survivors for posterity's sake.
So do penguins, gulls and terns, yet they can be bred in zoos. Also, the big colonies of the passenger pigeon mostly like where a phenomenon of the 19th century (possibly human induced), the effective population size of the species has been shown to have been in the hundreds of thousands range.
Oh, and the Carolina parakeet was bred in zoos, even in Europe. Unfortunately they weren't that consistent back then yet.
The reason why researchers go for those relatively boring species is their boringness: there are closely related species from which you can borrow cells (and eggs) which you than modify. There is no such thing for a huge (another cost factor) animal with no close relative left.
The idea of bringing something old world into current is compelling, definitely morbid in some sense, and primal.
Yeah, not a good mix, but what can I say? This is a want to see happen. I am likely to regret it, but maybe, just maybe it could be a good thing. Somehow.
The ~9ft wing span would be terrifying to see.
> Haast's eagles preyed on large, flightless bird species, including the moa, which was up to fifteen times the weight of the eagle.[9] It is estimated to have attacked at speeds up to 80 km/h (50 mph)
I wonder if these things attacked the early humans that inhabited New Zealand, before they went extinct.
Wow! Looks like large bald eagles can have wing spans of 8ft, so you might get a chance to be nearly (89%?) as terrified :)
> " The largest eagles are from Alaska, where large females may weigh up to 7.5 kg (17 lb) and span 2.44 m (8.0 ft) across the wings."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor#/media/File%3AV...
Yeah, basically a weird bird.
Michael Crichton thought, correctly, that Velociraptor was a better name.
The opposite. Birds are a type of dinosaurs, but the biggest dinosaurs like Triceratops weren't birds. I'm not wrong, feathers were found in small or middle sized dinosaurs, smaller than the elephant birds.
So no, the title is not really wrong unless there is a yet undiscovered bird that's even larger. The elephant bird was the biggest bird (or avian-dinosaur) that ever existed. It was smaller than other non-avian dinosaurs but these were not birds so no point comparing.
The confusion you are making is sometimes described as politician's syllogism. [0]
1) All birds are dinosaurs
2) All land dinosaurs are dinosaurs
3) Therefore, land dinosaurs are birds
birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs aren't birds
you've reversed the vectored direction of time in your claim
Edit: And what does "vector" add to your sentences?
"Other prehistoric animals, including mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and Dimetrodon, while often popularly conceived of as dinosaurs, are not taxonomically classified as dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are distantly related to dinosaurs, being members of the clade Ornithodira. The other groups mentioned are, like dinosaurs, members of Sauropsida (the reptile and bird clade), with the exception of Dimetrodon (which is a synapsid)."
If you ever look at different "artist's depiction" drawings about "dinosaurs" you might notice plenty of misconceptions: anatomically incorrect (and impossible) positions, strange mixes of species living in vastly different time periods, animals that aren't actually dinosaurs, etc.
'There has been a recent revival of interest in the famous Early Triassic thecodont Euparkeria, and Welman (1995) has discovered a suite of avian-like anatomical features in the basicranium. Paul (2002:179), an ardent advocate of the “birds-are-dinosaurs,” and more recently, “dinosaurs-are-birds” school, admits that, “Euparkeria is a suitable ancestral type for birds … and … Euparkeria is a good ancestral type for all archosaurs.”' https://doi.org/10.1642/0004-8038(2002)119[1187:BADSAT]2.0.C...
I still don't see what this has to do with a "time vector descriptor".
A: "you've reversed the vectored direction of time in your claim"
B: "you've reversed the direction of time in your claim"downvote me if you will but you were the one claiming dinosaurs are birds