File:Meleagris gallopavo (wild turkey).jpg

English: Meleagris gallopavo Linnaeus, 1758 - wild turkey at the Tennessee-North Carolina border, USA. (23 June 2008)

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.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Galliformes, Phasianidae

Locality: near Clingmans Dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, ~Tennessee-North Carolina border, USA

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More info. at:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_turkey