#I've known pterosaurs aren't dinos

[singsongraptor]

I spent six hours reading about bird wingspans and looking for information on dinosaurs that flew, but aren't birds. A significant part of that time was *also* going on a magnificent rant about the HUNDREDS of shitty "science" articles/posts/videos calling quetzalcoatlus the "largest flying dinosaur", so prolific that even when I excluded quetzalcoatlus from the search parameters I was still served that bullshit. The rant resulted in a dozen people across four platforms being aggressively informed about the fact that pterosaurs ARE NOT DINOSAURS JFC IT TAKES FIVE MINUTES TO FIND THAT OUT, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS ANCIENT STOP CALLING QUETZAL A DINOSAUR.

I literally had to specifically look up microraptorans to find the *actual* answer to the largest flying dinosaur because lazy, misinformed jackasses that think their memories of bad paleo media count as facts that don't need to be researched have filled the internet with blatant misinformation. !

Like ffs, a weasel is more closely related to a jaguar than quetzalcoatlus is to ANY dinosaur, there's at least 160 million years between quetzalcoatlus and its common ancestor with dinosaurs!

To quote a science writer from the article on Changyuraptor (the largest, non avian flying dinosaur)

It's important to note that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. As science writer Brian Switek has noted, "Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur is an error of the same order of magnitude as saying that our species is a marsupial." Both dinosaurs and pterosaurs have their own unique evolutionary history.

Quetzalcoatlus is a wonderful, weird animal, and pterosaurs are delightfully bizarre archosaurs that deserve to be respected! They're not dinosaurs, and that's ok! They're still cool on their own merits! The only dinosaurs that fly are avialens! Birds, their relatives, and related dromeosaurids! Get it together people!