Talk:Modern birds

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Diagram[edit]

I pasted some information together and audaciously drew a diagram, I would appreciate comments.

Sketch of a Neornithes tree in and around K-T

Jcwf (talk) 19:34, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Lead is extremely misleading[edit]

Neornithes redirects here. The lead of this article currently reads

"Modern birds (subclass Neornithes) are the members of class Aves that have survived into recent times and have coexisted with humans."

-- This is extremely misleading.

From Bird:

"Containing all modern birds, the subclass Neornithes is, due to the discovery of Vegavis, now known to have evolved into some basic lineages by the end of the Cretaceous"

- i.e., more than 65 million years ago. Many, many (perhaps most) genera of Neornithes did not survive into recent times and did not coexist with humans.

I suggest that Neornithes be re-characterized in the lead. It would be fine to say "including those genera which have survived into recent times and have coexisted with humans", but we should make it clear that this has nothing to do with the definition of Neornithes. Alternatively, we may want two different articles for two different possible meanings of the expression "Modern birds": One for the meaning "Neornithes", and the other "birds contemporaneous with humans". -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 18:54, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Too technical[edit]

This is article is too technical for most of our readers plus it has a lot of superfluous, flowery language that makes it read like a college text and not an encyclopedia. I worked on one section and added some links but it still needs editing. Rissa, Guild of Copy Editors (talk) 03:29, 22 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Sometimes the writer is an academic whose occupation requires obscure, genre-specific jargon to impress his or her peers and justify additional funding. They don't necessarily know how to turn it off on Wikipedia, or even that they should."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Too_long;_didn%27t_read

I just took a pass at editing it for readability, is that any better? Dinoguy2 (talk) 13:57, 22 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]