The audience of Ars isn't "general" and the usage wasn't colloquial. The article is about evolution and the pressures that caused the adaptation. It would have been nice if the author had demonstrated a bit more knowledge of the topic. Its a mistake that grows less forgivable the more years that pass. Hell, I recall the days when people frequently called whales fish. That wouldn't fly in article about evolution now, and neither should this.
Dinosaur literally means ‘terrible lizard’. It was originally coined as a description for the large, extinct, giant lizards. T-Rex, etc.
That it has later come to encompass things like seagulls is more a bait and switch on the public, than the public being idiots.
You might as well beat up on someone for calling Pluto a planet. Oh wait, it technically is again? My bad. Oh wait, it’s technically a dwarf planet. My mistake again!
Clearly, I’m the one who is an idiot, and it has nothing to do with experts causing confusion because it gets them headlines/justifies their existence and makes them feel superior to everyone else.
Bait and switch? Idiots? We are just saying we expect more from science communicators. Adding "non-avian" before the word "dinosaurs" wouldn't have made the article inaccessible to folks who haven't internalized the whole notion of clades.
Do penguins and cassowary count as "non-avian dinosaurs?" The videos of cassowary definitely give me Jurassic Park vibes.
In any case, many people are aware birds are not extinct. As a result, a claim of a "mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs" would implicitly not include "avian dinosaurs." Adding the "non-avian" qualifier does not assist in describing the particular global change to which the article refers.
Honestly, I think it’s just paleontologists sticking to the Dinosaur name because it gets them funding. ‘Doing a dig for dinosaur bones’, or being a ‘Dinosaur specialist’ is a lot more sellable than ‘expert in late Cretaceous avian precursors’, or digging for ‘bird precursor fossils’.
Which is what non ‘terrible lizard’ dinosaur studies are about.
Egyptology has a similar problem. Everyone wants to be known as someone who studies the pyramids, because being the dude that digs in the middens near a random Mastaba for a pharaoah nobody ever heard in the middle of desert that no tourist will ever want to visit is a lot harder to sell, even if it is better actual archeology.
Back in the 1800s when the name Dinosaur was coined no one suspected their connection to birds. The point has never been that the word, in most peoples minds, doesn't conjures up pictures of t-rex and triceratops. There's no argument there. The point is that someone writing an article for Ars should have not have perpetuated the common misconception that they all went extinct.
The clade has been expanded well beyond its literal, historic, or popular understanding.
Which is why the popular science article is confused, because the articles point is actually more correct from a popular point of view, while being at odds with the technical (but weird) newer definition.
Because the ‘terrible lizards’ DID go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, and what ended up evolving from their not really terrible, and not really land bound brethren at the time, while still with us, weren’t generally what any reasonable person would call a Terrible Lizard.
The taxonomy argument is a technical one that for the most part only interests people whose sole job is arguing about taxonomy. Which is a thing, but c’mon.
Which is why stuff like this exists and isn’t really wrong. [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/when-did-dinosaurs-become-extinct]. Because 99.99% of people looking for Dinosaur Bones are going to be really really confused if you hand them some chicken drumsticks. Even if technically it is correct.
If someone asked for a dinosaur fossil and you showed them a small winged thing embedded in a rock they likely would be confused too. Wind the clock back 65 million years to before the Cretaceous extinction event. The first bird like dinos appear in the Jurassic, ~100 millions year before the extinction. The time of the dinosaurs was full of small and large dinos adapted to all sorts of niches. In the end the flying therapods were the survivors.
We clearly have different view points, but I've enjoyed the discussion.
