But it is different -- it's a common misconception that dinosaurs are a form of reptile, when really they're a transition between reptiles and modern avians.

Dinosaurs were warm-blooded. . . .

I think you are conflating/confusing the two methods of classification. The Linnaean system lumps everything together into groups regardless of their monphyletaly, & names them. Cladistics only names monophyletic groups, & since "reptile" is paraphyletic, not monophyletic, it's in the dustbin. The word that replaced "reptile" (in a sense), is "amniote", & since birds & mammals are also amniotic, it is a valid monophyletic group. Dinosauria is a monophyletic group (that includes Aves), so in this sense, dinosaurs aren't reptiles, because they [reptiles] don't exist.

If, however, you are going to jump back to the old Linnaean system, & say crocs are reptiles, then in order to be consistent, dinosaurs are reptiles, too.

Their cultures aren't passed down, or at least not in a separate, recognizable form.

At most, this is an unproven fringe hypothesis, no?  Unless biology has changed a lot sense last I looked (which is quite possible).

Here's the best statement I can find on the issue, taken from a ludicrous creationist / evolutionist debate I found on another forum.  It puts things elegantly, if rather hifallutinly:

When I use the term "dinosaur," which is itself, as I said, a fairly sloppy and useless term, I use it to connotatively more than denotatively and, remember, my usage of it was first in the thread.  All I meant was simply, "Giant, scary lizards were largely wiped out, but you can still see crocodiles."  Using the bird analogy perhaps would have been more apt, but, as a romantic, nothing short of the extinct elephant bird (damn those Polynesians and Captain Cook!) comes close to capturing "dinosaurness" for me.  Huge, implacable crocs, on the other hand, do quite nicely.

As a side note:


Sure.  But I think the better analogy to the SM is a hegemonic power like Rome, not a regional one like the Etruscans (as significant a role as they may have played in history).  Huge, powerful empires can be demolished and fade in prominence, but nevertheless Rome, the Ottomans, the Caliphate, the Chinese, even short-lived empires like Hitler's, will have continued cultural and ethnological existence until the Earth gets destroyed.

Now, I agree with you that in SC2 there are better means of wiping people out, and the Dnyarri might have been more thorough and effective, but who knows?  What little we know about them suggests incredible incompetence (indeed, the one Dnyarri we meet is more like a petty, scheming Shylock than an all-powerful Elder of Zion), and given how easily races avoid annihilation in the SC universe, I'm comfortable with the idea that any of the races mentioned as destroyed could still be alive.  If told badly, it would, of course, be bad story-telling, but then so is the complete repopulation of the Shofixi by a Jerry Lewis-style Asian stereotype.  So, there you go.

This is... not true. The superorder Dinosauria is defined as being separate from other archosaurs, including the crocodilians, because they have upright legs that are set directly under their bodies, while other reptiles, like crocodilians and lizards, have legs that extend outward from their bodies.

This is how dinosaurs are defined by biologists, even if the word is used more loosely colloquially. An ichythysaur is therefore not a dinosaur, and neither is a pterodactyl, and neither is an iguanadon. . . .  [Dinosaur] specifically was coined for those large, extinct creatures that have reptilian features otherwise but seem to have a more developed, "modern" skeletal structure, with the upright legs.

Paleontologists who use cladistic taxonomy will say that, properly, birds really are a kind of dinosaur

Fish had spines, then amphibians could walk on land, reptiles could raise young on land, mammals and dinosaurs had upright bodies powered by warm-blooded metabolisms and birds could fly and walk upright (and were also warm blooded).