File:Tympanuchus cupido cupido (heath hen) (14966959413).jpg

Tympanuchus cupido cupido (Linnaeus, 1758) - female heath hen (mount, FMNH 11053, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA).

The heath hen is an extinct subspecies of greater prairie chicken that lived along America's Eastern Seaboard. Prairie chickens, along with the pheasants, are members of Family Phasianidae. The heath hen was abundant in its range before the 1800s and was used extensively as a food source by early American settlers. Recent research findings lean toward distinguishing the heath hen as a species separate from the greater prairie chicken.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Galliformes, Phasianidae

Birds are small to large, warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered, bipedal vertebrates capable of powered flight (although some are secondarily flightless). Many scientists characterize birds as dinosaurs, but this is consequence of the physical structure of evolutionary diagrams. Birds aren’t dinosaurs. They’re birds. The logic & rationale that some use to justify statements such as “birds are dinosaurs” is the same logic & rationale that results in saying “vertebrates are echinoderms”. Well, no one says the latter. No one should say the former, either.