Talk:neornithine

Weird, ambiguous phrasing

"Any of the feathered dinosaurs that evolved into modern birds" hints of a polyphiletic origin of "modern birds." Somewhat like "Homo sapiens" as "any of the bipedal anthropoids that evolved into modern humans." It's roughly a technical synonym for "modern birds" (although there are dozens of classifications with borderline-synonyms in this branch), but "any of" referring to "feathered dinosaurs that evolved into modern birds," sort of suggests a polyphiletic origin of "modern birds" from multiple feathered dinosaur lineages (implicitly multiple non-avian/non-bird dinosaurs), while "modern birds" evolved from a single lineage of "old birds"/"already-bird dinosaurs" (extinct "avialae"/"aves") which in turn "evolved from" feathered non-bird/non-avialae/non-aves dinosaurs. Maybe something along the lines of "all modern birds, a lineage that split from archaic extinct birds at some point in the Cretaceous period" would be a better "evolutionary" phrasing, although it don't sound too dictionary-y to me.