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basstard writes:

An article in BBC Magazine notes how it now seems dinosaurs were more like birds than lizards.

"Dinosaurs are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle and thin again at the other end," declared the pedantic Miss Anne Elk in the famous Monty Python sketch more than 40 years ago. Miss Elk's observation still holds fast, but many of our other opinions about these giants of the Jurassic have changed.

The word "dinosaur" is made from the combination of two Greek words, "deinos" which means terrible or fearfully great, and "saur" which means lizard. It was first used in 1842 by the palaeontologist Richard Owen who saw some similarities between huge fossil bones and the skeletons of living reptiles. He suggested "establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria".

[...] Much intellectual blood has been shed in the corridors of palaeontological research institutes over the years as evidence has been amassed to show that dinosaurs were highly varied in size and behaviour, and more like birds than reptiles. "All the evidence is that dinosaurs were warm-blooded," says Mike Benton, professor of palaeontology at Bristol University. "When you look at the bone histology [structure] you see they had growth patterns and replacement of bone very like mammals and birds... Many if not most dinosaurs had feathers." Many of those feathers were coloured ginger and white and black.

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