[Swizec]

> I don't want to harp on this point, but the birds-are-dinosaurs seems a meaningless semantic classification to me, more about our definitions than reality.

It's a lot more direct than "mammals are a type of reptile".

Particularly because late stage dinosaurs, the theropods, had feathers and generally looked like birds with teeth that can't fly. Some later models could in fact fly.

If you look at this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur

You'll see that there is a single step from Velociraptor to Birds.

> The scientific consensus is that birds are a group of theropod dinosaurs that evolved during the Mesozoic Era. A close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was first proposed in the nineteenth century after the discovery of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx in Germany.

It took a lot of steps to go from reptiles to mammals.