>>1988583>Except that's wrong.??
What the fuck are you talking about?
All modern birds belong to the clade neornithes, this isn't up for debate.
Ratites is a paraphyletic term referring to some orders in the infraclass palaeognathae, because in most definitions it excludes tinamous, which aren't flightless and 'flightless' is one of the defining attributes of the ratite paraphyletic grouping.
Palaeognaths and neognaths (the two clades which make up neornithes) diverged almost as soon as the clade neornithes appeared in the fossil record around the Santonian age of the Late Cretaceous, but one study of molecular data found that modern bird orders, including the palaeognathous ones, began diverging from one another as early as the Early Cretaceous.
A Linnaean synonym for neornithes is Aves. It basically just means birds that are toothless. Neornithes is known to have split into several modern lineages by the end of the Mesozoic era. Perhaps the versatility of the toothless beak is something that contributed to the ability of neornithes to survive.
>Ratites are NOT descended from flying birds and there's ample evidence for that.Is this in the context where 'ample evidence' is a synonym for 'evidence I made up and am not providing because it doesn't exist'? Ratites is not a valid scientific term when it comes to phylogeny, since it is paraphyletic. All palaeognaths, including the flightless and flying ones, evolved from flying birds, though different families developed it independently. Are you suggesting that palaeognaths didn't evolve secondary flightlessness and that their ancestors, all the way back up avialae, were flightless? Because that's retarded.
