Lots to unpack here so I’ll start from the top. “Furries” doesn’t exclusively mean mammals. It’s more of a blanket term for the entire fandom, including scalies, aquatics, avians and others. Next, birds are not reptiles, nor are they dinosaurs. Birds are birds and have all the taxonomic traits of birds. While they share a common ancestor with reptiles in the Archosaurs, birds descended specifically from the Theropods which developed unique bone structures and warm blood making them distinctly non-reptilian. Furthermore, the later evolution of beaks and wings became a required part of bird taxonomy, thus making them distinctly different from the saurids. So simply put, Avians are definitely not scalies (and yes, that includes crocodiles which are just as related to birds as lizards as they deviated as Protocrocodilians during the Triassic period where lizards didn’t deviate until the Cretaceous). As for feathered Saurids, it sounds like you’ll need a new word. They aren’t Avian yet because they don’t have beaks and wings. They aren’t reptiles anymore because they’re feathered and warm blooded. They’re in that weird, middle ground in evolution where they left one Kind but haven’t arrived at the next Kind yet.
Anonymous
asked:
So furries are mammals and scalies are reptiles. But, as anyone with an eye to science can tell you, birds (being a type of dinosaur) are reptiles. So does that mean that all avians are scalies, or does the scaly classification only include those anthros of lizards (including advanced lizards, like snakes) and crocodilians, regardless of crocodilians being closer to birds than to lizards? And where do accurately-feathered saurids fall on classification?