>>57257959>>laypeople use "dinosaur" to mean ancient reptile. But the people who actually study them "dinosaur" has always referred to a specific group of ancient reptiles defined by certain skull and limb structures. Stuff like Pterosaurs, any of the ones with flipper, Dimetrodon, along with others were never officially considered dinosaurs, Dimetrodon in particular is more close to mammals even.Look, I know probably more about cladistics and paleontology than you, and I say let people use "dinosaur" in such a way to include pterosaurs. And I don't mean just colloquially among laymen, but also as a proper scientific term. Because the distinction does not matter. The distinction MIGHT matter if a single pterosaur lineage survived to the present day and we then claimed that this modern pterosaur is not a dinosaur, but that ancient pterosaurs or modern birds are dinosaurs, because then we would be paraphyletic. But that isn't happening. We can make the cut what we include in dinosaur at a much earlier point in the tree of life and it changes absolutely nothing
>but "dinosaur" refers to a specific branching point in the tree of life!Individual "branching point events" are meaningless. There have been millions of them, and most of them are unnamed. To only a few have humans given names. Why can't "dinosaur" refer to the lineage that includes the immediate parent species that gave rise to dinosaurs? And so on. You can bubble this up the tree till you reach the branching point with pterosaurs. My argument loops back into my initial point here: we can do it, and it does not actually change anything cladistically because we are not being paraphyletic, but rather still monophyletic.
tl;dr: huge biology enthusiasts tells people they are not making a mistake calling pterodactyls "dinosaurs", as the distinction is entirely meaningless in nature and it's purely a matter of human nomenclature.
