Yes, dinosaurs were reptiles.

Reptiles are a group of animals that includes lizards , snakes , turtles , dinosaurs , and in some classifications, birds.

The term reptile is loosely defined in everyday English to mean scaly, cold-blooded, egg-laying animals. In cladistics (a way of classifying life forms), the reptiles are more strictly defined and include the common ancestors of the turtles, lepidosaurs (lizards, snakes, tuataras), and archosaurs (crocodilians, dinosaurs, and birds). The maintenance of body temperature (cold- vs. warm-blooded) is not a factor in this classification, but skull and egg structure are.

It is not at all certain whether the dinosaurs were cold-blooded; some of the small, fast dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded and the larger sauropods (like Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus) and the sail-backed dinosaurs (like Spinosaurus, Amargasaurus, and Ouranosaurus) were most likely cold-blooded.

---

Go to Question #2

Click to read our Privacy Policy

E-mail