I did not know this! I guess it explains why some are so different from others.
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“Fish” is not a taxonomic category. There are a lot of things with fish in the name that are not related to “fish”, as we usually think of them (Actinopterygians). A starfish, a dogfish, a hagfish and a lungfish are not in the same category as tuna.
Either birds are reptiles or some reptiles aren’t. (Not really a taxonomy question or apropos for high school, but…).
The turtle, tortoise and terrapin thing is actually a bit more complex. Although in the US we now regard terrapins as only those turtles in the genus Malaclemys, originally the word was used to infer a freshwater turtle that was edible so lots of things were terrapins. And as previously stated, while tortoises are turtles that live on land (family Testudinidae), there are lots of turtle species that are terrestrial but are not tortoises.
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I remember when I was in high school one of my classes had this off-topic debate about whether “insects were animals”. This was in probably 1997 or 1998 so I’d be hopeful that people were more educated on the topic now.
Except my nephew who graduated in 2020 had one of his classes do the EXACT SAME THING. In 2019. We were both dumbfounded. Especially because he knew the story of it happening to me and we always marveled at how baffling it was that it had even happened at all.
It seems like the kids you’re referring to probably understand this much but it was the first thing I thought of.
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Insects aren’t cute, all animals are cute, hence insects can’t be animals. qed.
If you are clueless in biology you can compensate with a bit of maths! ;-)
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So many people think that butterflies and moths are separate groups of animals. Butterflies are a subgroup of moths (or, if you prefer, the term “moth” is taxonomically meaningless). I’ve even run into otherwise fairly knowledgeable insect enthusiasts who think Lepidoptera is divided into two suborders, one for butterflies and one for moths.
The relationship between snakes and lizards is the same, though I don’t encounter that one every day as I do with butterflies/moths. Snakes are a group of squamates and “lizards” are all the remaining squamates, so either snakes are a subgroup of lizards or the word “lizard” is taxonomically meaningless. In the same way, birds are a subgroup of reptiles (or “reptile” is taxonomically meaningless).
Because herpetology covers reptiles and amphibians, loads of people think that reptiles and amphibians form a group separate from other vertebrates. But of course those two groups aren’t closely related: the closest living relatives of living reptiles are the birds, and the closest living relatives of “reptiles plus birds” are the mammals.
I frequently run into people who think that “mice” and “rats” are two groups of rodents, when in fact a wide range of small myomorph rodents are called “mice” and an equally wide range of larger myomorph rodents are called “rats” with no regard to what is related to what.
When you add extinct animals, the misconceptions are even thicker on the ground. People think that pterosaurs, mososaurs, and plesiosaurs are dinosaurs because they are all reptiles that went extinct around the same time. For that matter, many people think dinosaurs are closely related to lizards. And non-mammalian synapsids are often called “mammal-like reptiles” when they aren’t closely related to reptiles at all (“reptile-like stem mammals” would be better).
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I’ve run into this too. Someone I know was flabbergasted when I told her that insects were animals (and she was part of the way through a degree in environmental science at the time).
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I think I alluded to this above. To most people, ‘animal’ implies vertebrates, especially mammalian vertebrates. To illustrate the point, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_(biology)#:~:text=In%20biological%20classification%2C%20class%20(Latin,fitting%20between%20phylum%20and%20order. There is a composite photo of “Example of class. The 18 most animal species” which does not make sense, but they are all mammals!
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I’m not sure I agree with that assessment. Dinosaurs were most likely one type of reptile, which is now extinct (I am by no means a reptile expert!). The extinct Trilobites are still classed as Arthropods in spite of not resembling any modern Arthropod. Mind you, I still cling to the belief that Arthropods are not monophyletic group!
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I suppose, by extension, then we may just call everything Archaea and call it quits. 
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I guess I could see how people view it like “animals, plants, insects”, rather than “animals, plants” but it definitely highlights a major misunderstanding on a very basic level. Which happens. The fact that it’s a reoccurring problem/misunderstanding among people though makes it seem like something in the education sus ten may be lacking. But I don’t think that’s all that surprising.
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Except that birds are reptiles. They’re very strange reptiles, but they are reptiles. Lepidosauria, the superorder that contains all reptiles, has two evolutionary forks. One of those forks gave rise to tuatara, and to the group that contains snakes and lizards. The other fork gave rise to turtles, crocodiles, and birds. So either a bird is a reptile, or crocodiles and turtles are not reptiles. There’s a good diagram of it here: https://theconversation.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-reptiles-any-more-and-heres-why-31355, though the diagram is simplified and neglects to have non-avian dinosaurs in there. Dinosaurs are all descended, as far as we can tell, from an odd little proto-crocodilian that branched off in two different directions; crocodilians and dinosaurs.
Birds are roughly as closely related to lizards as crocodiles are to lizards, and modern taxonomy groups things by what’s related to what else. Birds aren’t included in most discussions of reptiles because they’re so dissimilar that it’s often not useful to include them, but they are reptiles. Just as dinosaurs were reptiles.
(Also, not all dinosaurs had feathers, only some of the ones that eventually gave rise to the avian dinosaurs we still have today.)
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I would argue they’re not that strange at all, it just so happened we don’t see other reptiles with those features anymore, but that’s what time does to groups.
Reptiles did have feathers in many groups, they evolved much before dinosaurs even split, feathers are just modified scales, so nothing extraordinary in having them. Dinosaurs fit everything in how we think of reptiles, reptiles are not just modern groups, so why should be only stay on those when talking about reptiles?
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To an English-speaking herpetologist, the word Turtle would embrace everything from freshwater turtles (or terrapins) to marine turtles to tortoises. Tortoise is pretty much applied to just the family Testudinidae. Terrapin is now mainly applied to the Diamondback Terrapin of North America.
Frog can include all Anura, including what we call toads. Frog and toad probably got established to differentiate between True Frogs (Ranidae) and True Toads (Bufonidae) in Europe/Britain, but there are many families of Anura that don’t fit neatly into the traditional “frog” or “toad” category. So the term frog is all-encompassing.
The term Reptile is currently just a catch-all word for everything in the diverse lineage that includes modern squamates, turtles, crocodilians, and birds … but minus the birds. We should probably just get rid of it.
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Depends where the English speaking herpetologist lives and works tho.
Our Cape Town Aquarium has turtles. Hatchlings who were trapped in the cold Benguela Current and are rehabbed before release. Those are turtles.
‘divided by a common language’
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They’re all turtles. It’s turtles all the way down, as the saying goes.
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Definitely a tortoise at the bottom :p, and if you’re British-speaking that’s not a turtle! (There may be a difference in the herpetologist subculture, I don’t know, but I agree with Wikipedia’s assessment of the use of the terms in general).
Names, of course, exist to help people recognise things as they are - not to help people unravel the evolutionary relationships of things. This is why I why I tend not to say things like ‘birds are reptiles’, because that’s only true if you adopt a phylogenetic definition of reptile - which no-one does! Having said that, it’s a good way of making the point memorably, so there’s a place for that in an educational context :)
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out of topic but I have heard that dinosaur were warm blooded, I forgot where I read, but I read it
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There is no firm consensus on that, but it is possible. Were Dinosaurs Warm-Blooded? (thoughtco.com)
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At least for some there’re enough evidence, and with documented nocturnal theropods it’s more of a question which groups were warm blooded, e.g. as I remember saurapods are thought to be inertial as they accumulated enough heat in them with their size. I don’t think there’s any reason to have it appeared in birds first, it definitely is an ancestral feature and it makes sense to how active predators were, maybe with fully separated heart too.
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I won’t argue with Wikipedia and certainly won’t say that the way other English speakers use the terms is wrong. Simply that, the word turtle works well to capture all species in the Testudines just as frog works for all Anura.
Interestingly, the word terrapin has a North American (Alqonquian) origin, but seems to be more broadly used for freshwater turtles outside of North America than it is here.
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