Comment on Would it have made sense in the 80s to believe there were dinosaurs 40 million years ago ?
wanderer@lemmy.world 4 months agoWe’ve known that birds were descended from dinosaurs for a long time. Best I can tell, it was first proposed in the 1800’s, largely abandoned by the early 1900’s and then revived in the 1970’s. It was not new information about the lineage of birds that caused us to start saying ‘birds are dinosaurs’, but a different method of classification: Cladistics.