Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4010415-20131006060026/@comment-25399914-20141026185243

PuffDragon wrote: In no way were Dinosaurs warmblooded - that defies the very definition of the species as being related to reptiles (or rather them being related to dinos).

What is true however is that copntemporary to dinosaurs there had been warmblooded species around already. The definition of a mammals as separate from reptiles is extremely arbitrary. The actual textbook definition of a mammal is that mammals have mammary glands hence the name.

In terms of genetics birds are more closely related to crocodiles then crocodiles are related to Tuatara. Some people still consider birds reptiles.

All species generate some heat through there metabolism but mammals and bird metabolisms are faster and so create more heat. They also have the ability to regulate there metabolisms creating and so regulate temperature better.

Leather back turtle (reptiles) are able to regulate temperature through metabolism and are sometimes considered warm blooded and sword fish and tuna also have this ability but all these species a do this in different ways to mammals and birds. The fish are still fish and the leatherback turtle is still a reptile.

This state of affaires is brought about by two problems. The first is laziness as people don't want to put the effort into changing things and the second are traditionalist. Which considering naturalists once included people like Darwin is truly a sad reflection on just how far people can shove there heads up there own arsehole. The traditionalists stick to classifying species by how they were classified over 100 years ago in spite this no longer making any sense at all.

The sadist example I can think of off the top of my head is the domestic cat still being classified by far to many people as a separate species to the wild cat. The definition of a species is meant to be that it can interbreed and create viable offspring which domestic and wildcats can do. Added to this is the fact that the genetics of the domestic cat lay entirely within the natural variation found within the dessert cat subspecies of wildcat (by this I mean genes found within domestic cats can be found within a large enough sample of wild dessert cats but not vice versa).