After a certain age people stop asking you what your favorite dinosaur is, and I think that’s sad.
My current one’s the Anchiornis, because it’s in the same clade as birds so it’s in their family tree, and it really looks like a prototype of a bird. It had 4 wings for example, but it already looked very birb-y:
(Figured I’d just turn an earlier comment into an actual post because why not)
Because they don’t descend from those ancestors. Instead they evolved from some other, much earlier, reptile ancestor. They are about as dinosaurs as crocodiles or snakes are dinosaurs.