Is an eagle a dinosaur

Answer 1

In a manner of speaking. Birds are almost certainly the DESCENDENTS of some kind of dinosaur. Probably the same line that produced the Velociraptor.

The relationship of birds to dinosaurs was long obscured by the presence of preconceived notions.

When the first large fossils were uncovered in the Nineteenth Century, many rural people were reminded of chickens, but the scientists of the day instantly rejected the idea that these huge creatures could be related to birds and by naming them "dinosaurs," which means "terrible lizards," they fixed the idea that they were lizard-like.

Dinosaurs WERE reptiles, as lizards are also, but they were of an advanced kind of reptile, significantly different from the lizards and turtles which were also on the Earth in their time. Birds can also be viewed as kind of advanced reptiles (check out their scaly feet).

As science advanced, more and more evidence supported the bird-dinosaur connection: better detailed fossils showed that some dinosaurs had feathers; microscopic analysis suggested DNA links with living birds, notably the chicken, so long dismissed as a ridiculous rural idea.

This is long-winded, and for that I apologize, but I've seen this question asked so many times that I thought I'd lay it out in a manner that both lay people and professionals could understand, just in case one of the latter is curious and doesn't already know all this. Here goes:

The Class Reptilia, as it is understood today by most vertebrate systematists, is NOT defined by cold-bloodedness, having scales, or being slithery. It is defined as the group descended from the common ancestor of living turtles, snakes, lizards, crocodilians, and birds (yes, birds). That would include ALL the descendents of that common ancestor. Animals like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, today's snakes, lizards, crocodiles, turtles, and the dinosaurs. Some vertebrate systematist do not include dinosaurs among the reptiles and this, I think, is a mistake.

A very early reptilian group known as diadectomorphs is among the earliest non-amphibian vertebrate tetrapods, and is in the Class Amniota. Amniotes are those animals who evolved the ability to lay their eggs out of the water, a fact that separates them from the Amphibia. The line that led to mammals belongs to a group within the Amniota called the synapsids, and synapsids are not thought to be reptiles, but rather the taxon most closely related to the Reptilia. Early synapsids such as pelycosaurs (the ones with the big fin on their backs that are, incidentally, not dinosaurs), the diadectomorphs, and early reptiles are very similar to one another skeletally, but these are by and large primitive resemblances (i.e.diagnostic of the fact that all are amniotes or amniote-like) so they tell little about what it means specifically to be a reptile.

Today, the Class Reptilia is diagnosed by a number of derived features including a number of non-skeletal features such as a dorsoventricular ridge in the brain, the ability to synthesize uric acid in the liver, etc., which clearly can't be used when considering dinosaur classification. But there are skeletal features that diagnose this group pretty well, for e.g., the reduction of the supratemporal bone in the skull, the loss of the anterior coronoid bone in the lower jaw, and the loss of the one of the tarsal bones (the centrale) in the hindfoot. Dinosaurs feature all these characteristics as do birds, (and there are others).

Dinosaurs are NOT closely related to the reptiles of today, and there is no reason to believe that they were not endothermic (warm blooded), which today's reptiles definitely are not. On the other hand, there are plenty of good reasons to believe that the smaller ones at least, were warm blooded. And for what it's worth, excluding those who refer to themselves as "creation scientists" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) none of the scientists I spoke with doubt that dinosaurs are ancestral to birds -- in fact, it's generally agreed that birds are nothing but feathered dinosaurs.

Since dinosaurs and crocodilians both belong to the Archosauria, birds are considered to be the closest living relatives that the Crocodilians have on the planet today.

Answer 2

Yes, "raptors" are Birds of Prey. Birds that eat other animals.

Answer 3

Yes, "Raptors" are birds of prey. Birds that eat other animals.

Answer 4

Technically yes. Birds are now classified as dinosaurs.