File:Fregata magnificens (magnificent frigatebird) 2.jpg

English: Fregata magnificens Mathews, 1914 - male magnificent frigatebird (mount, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland, Ohio, USA).

Magnificent frigatebirds (Family Fregatidae) are moderately large, tropical to subtropical seabirds with a long, bifurcated tail and an unusually long wingspan. They seldom land at the ocean surface, but inhabit islands and marine coastlines. Adult plumage is mostly blackish. Adult male frigatebirds have a red throat pouch, which they enlarge while engaged in courtship display (www.junglewalk.com/animal-pictures/102/Magnificent-Frigat...).

Natural distribution: tropical to subtropical Atlantic & eastern Pacific.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Suliformes, Fregatidae

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Birds are small to large, warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered, bipedal vertebrates capable of powered flight (although some are secondarily flightless). Many scientists characterize birds as dinosaurs, but this is consequence of the physical structure of evolutionary diagrams. Birds aren’t dinosaurs. They’re birds. The logic & rationale that some use to justify statements such as “birds are dinosaurs” is the same logic & rationale that results in saying “vertebrates are echinoderms”. Well, no one says the latter. No one should say the former, either.

However, birds are evolutionarily derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds first appeared in the Triassic or Jurassic, depending on which avian paleontologist you ask. They inhabit a wide variety of terrestrial and surface marine environments, and exhibit considerable variation in behaviors and diets.