Some choice snippets from a YouTube video supposedly debunking myths about dinosaurs.

1. Birds are not the “modern ancestors” of dinosaurs. This doesn’t even make logical sense, as the earliest dinosaurs appeared before the earliest birds. Birds themselves are a group of dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds. Most evidence of feathers in non-avian dinosaurs comes not from quill knobs, but from actual fossilised feathers.

2. Pterosauria is not a genus. 

3. Each of those is a genus, not a subspecies.

4. There’s absolutely no evidence that Quetzalcoatlus was flightless, and lots of evidence that it could fly.

5. No matter which way the evidence lies on the synonymy of Torosaurus and Triceratops, Triceratops was named first and thus would take priority if the two are synonymous.

6. Archaeologists do not study fossils. Archaeologists study ancient civilisations. People who study fossils are called palaeontologists.

Incorrect!  Well, uh, partly incorrect anyways.

Not all dinosaurs are extinct, that much is true, but they do not live on as crocodiles or alligators (or caimans, gharials, etc.). Modern dinosaurs are known as:

birds.

Also incorrect. Birds are descended from more adaptable cousins of theropod dinosaurs. The idea that theropods some how saw The End coming and went “let’s evolve into birds” is a pretty common pseudo-scientific fallacy. Theropod dinosaurs are extinct.

I get the impression you haven’t quite learned how to read phylogenetic trees, @robbiblack. Either that or you’ve misunderstood something along the way, as this sounds a fair bit like the old saw that “humans aren’t/didn’t evolve from apes, they only share a common ancestor”. True enough, having two systems for naming things, one informal, which gives us “ape”, and a formal one, that has “Hominoidea” overlapping most if not all of the former’s conceptual span, can be a bit confusing. Especially so when the informal name has been in use longer than the scientific one, and the respective usage has evolved over time. But, to put it simply, looking at this phylogeny of extant African hominoids from Moeller et al. (2016) (fig. 1), it’s a bit awkward to be able to call the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of chimpanzees and bonobos an ape and then be stumped at what to call the concestor of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos informally when the closest relation of this latter group, gorillas, are called apes as well. And then there’s conundrum of what to call the MRCA of all of these considering what orangutans and gibbons are called.

It’s fair that informal names don’t have to follow taxonomies or phylogenies strictly, especially if prior usage is well established, but the case of theropods and birds is a bit distinct. “Theropod” is derived from scientific nomenclature and as such one would expect its usage to follow use of “Theropoda” by scientists. Several analyses show that birds, as characteristic as they are, do nest within Theropoda, that they are theropods. See:

So your statement that “birds are descended from more adaptable cousins of theropod dinosaurs” is perplexing. I can only wonder what material you’ve read to come to such a conclusion.

And no, the idea isn’t that theropods “saw The End coming” and prepared for it, but rather that luck had it birds diverged enough from the rest of them in life history and ecology that when disaster struck some stragglers managed to flourish in the aftermath. 

the christmas “dinosaur”

The Haast’s eagle falls at number 11 and Terror birds fall at number 6 on this list.

Who actually liked this?

I had to witness this archaic talk with my own eyes so now you all have to as well.

(le punches you for subjecting me to literal torture)

Spinosaurus, the colossal theropod that was brought to mainstream attention by Jurassic Park III (2001), did not live in South America. It was actually from North Africa, its fossils have been discovered in both Egypt and Morocco. 

However, a relative of Spinosaurus was indeed native to South America: Oxalaia quilombensis!

(Source)

(That’s the creature’s premaxillae btw)

Could be a typo, but still neat! There’s also Irritator (It does have a synonym, can’t recall it st the moment, it starts with an A)

Correct! Irritator (gosh I love that thing’s name) was from Brazil, the holotype specimen being kept in the University of São Paulo.

Its synonym also does indeed start with an A: Angaturama limai.