Edit: This was handled in forum #170274
Disclaimer: I'm not a dinosaur expert nor do I even claim to be an amateur. I used wikipedia for all of my sourcing for convenience. Yes, the dinosaur tags are confusing and the taxonomy (here and in the real world) is a mess.
That being said...right now we use raptor for velociraptor, which is one of the more well-known dinosaurs and the most used dinosaur therapods on this site. Surprisingly, therapod itself is also highly tagged, despite there being absolutely no implications to it. There are a few more specific tags which, taxonomy-wise, the tags run like this:
- dinosaur
- theropod (~800 posts) - Technically includes modern birds, I think.
- dromaeosaurid (4 posts)
- austroraptor (3 posts)
- deinonychus (113 posts, surprisingly)
- dromaeosaurus, dromaeosaur (~10 posts each)
- microraptor (2 posts)
- utahraptor (20 posts)
- velociraptor/raptor (1293 posts)
However the current implications actually run like this:
...Which is probably more specific than most of us even care about. However, there are obviously more than a few dinosaur enthusiasts here so we might as well talk about implications/aliases and what options we have.
I'm not 100% on what should be implicated to what, but the following two options seem to make the most sense to me (keeping in mind both practicality and simplicity).
Option 1
- dinosaur
- theropod - Purposely exclude birds from this
- austroraptor
- deinonychus
- dromaeosaurus <-alias- dromaeosaur
- microraptor
- utahraptor
- velociraptor/raptor
- dromaeosaurid - Alias to dromaesaurus? theropod? Honestly I can't tell these apart.
Option 2
- dinosaur
- dromaeosaurid - Alias to dromaesaurus? theropod? Honestly I can't tell these apart.
Option 3 (nuke everything mode)
- dinosaur
- theropod - Purposely exclude birds from this
- velociraptor/raptor
- Alias to raptor or theropod: austroraptor, deinonychus (or implicate since it's well-used), dromaeosaurus, dromaeosaur, dromaeosaurid, microraptor, utahraptor
Option 1 has the advantage of being more technically correct, while option 2 has the advantage of being more visually convenient (probably).
Option 3 is really silly, has questionable practicality, and is probably the slightly less lazy version of the current "raptor -> dinosaur" implication we have now. However, after trying to find and categorize all these tags I realized that this is pretty much how I feel about this classification at this point, so I decided to include it anyways.
Related:
What should therapod cover?
By the time I got to this, I started to get a bit of a headache and couldn't really figure out what other species are included here.
Updated by Furrin Gok