Perhaps you're thinking of the creatures we saw in Jurassic Park? Yeah, those are somewhat inaccurate. Velociraptor, for example, was the size of a turkey and covered in feathers, with its long tail held upwards, like this:
The opposite. Birds are a type of dinosaurs, but the biggest dinosaurs like Triceratops weren't birds. I'm not wrong, feathers were found in small or middle sized dinosaurs, smaller than the elephant birds.
Birds are a type of dinosaur called recently avian dinosaur. The other dinosaurs (non-avian dinosaurs) are definitely not a type of bird.
So no, the title is not really wrong unless there is a yet undiscovered bird that's even larger. The elephant bird was the biggest bird (or avian-dinosaur) that ever existed. It was smaller than other non-avian dinosaurs but these were not birds so no point comparing.
The confusion you are making is sometimes described as politician's syllogism. [0]
As long as we're on the topic, not all of what we (the laymen) think of as dinosaurs were dinosaurs! Maybe you knew that already but I only recently discovered that fact and now I'm sharing it. From the wikipedia page:
"Other prehistoric animals, including mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and Dimetrodon, while often popularly conceived of as dinosaurs, are not taxonomically classified as dinosaurs. Pterosaurs are distantly related to dinosaurs, being members of the clade Ornithodira. The other groups mentioned are, like dinosaurs, members of Sauropsida (the reptile and bird clade), with the exception of Dimetrodon (which is a synapsid)."
Apparently some people think birds are dinosaurs and other people (sometimes even the same person) think dinosaurs are birds:
'There has been a recent revival of interest in the famous Early Triassic thecodont Euparkeria, and Welman (1995) has discovered a suite of avian-like anatomical features in the basicranium. Paul (2002:179), an ardent advocate of the “birds-are-dinosaurs,” and more recently, “dinosaurs-are-birds” school, admits that, “Euparkeria is a suitable ancestral type for birds … and … Euparkeria is a good ancestral type for all archosaurs.”'https://doi.org/10.1642/0004-8038(2002)119[1187:BADSAT]2.0.C...
I still don't see what this has to do with a "time vector descriptor".
I'm not a dinosaur expert (but this is hacker news, so...). You know who else wasn't a dinosaur expert? All those people back in the 1800s who lumped theropods, sauropods, and everything else together and called them dinosaurs. So now the definition of dinosaur is, paraphrased from wikipedia, "anything from descended from the most recent ancestor of all the stuff we want to call a dinosaur". I can believe ostriches and elephant birds and small theropods are related. Can you believe the possibly imaginary Brontosaurus and T Rex are related? Is there an intellectually honest reason to lump them together?
Sure, there's an intellectually sound reason for the lumping: There was a long period of earth's history where enormous reptiles were prominent, and almost all but the crocodile family died out. So, it makes sense to have a word for all the age-of-reptiles reptiles we see in fossils. "Dinosaurs" works great. As such, it includes pterosaurs and sea reptiles even.
Sort of. Apatosaurus was first, so Brontosaurus lost out as a junior synonym (first to name the things get to name the things, which gives us a silly name meaning "hyrax-like beast" - hyracotherium - for something that's obviously the dawn horse - eohippus)... except that there's very good reason now to believe that they weren't the same species.
