Re: another dumb question: Terror Birds are not dinosaurs?

[Paula Goodman <paulawilder@mac.com>]

Oh, thank you  David! THAT'S the kind of thing I really wanted to know. 
We hear so much about how dinosaurs and birds share many morphological 
traits, but the differences -- as  you listed, of those we hear of not 
so much...

Paula

On Jun 29, 2007, at 2:30 PM, David Marjanovic wrote:

> > what would tip you off that this thing was closer to a
> > chicken than to an oviraptor? The shortness of the tail?
>
> Yes, among a long list of other things, such as (off the top of my 
> head) the extremely long sacrum, the modified wing, the makeup of the 
> palate, the way the neck vertebrae articulate with each other, the 
> number of neck and back vertebrae, the bone fusions in the ankle, the 
> proportions of the leg, the greatly reduced fibula (one of the two 
> bones in the lower leg), the mobile upper jaw (which is connected to 
> several easily visible features of the skull, such as the number of 
> separate holes in it), and the general lack of oviraptorosaur 
> peculiarities. :-)