File:Piranga olivacea (scarlet tanager).jpg

English: Piranga olivacea (Gmelin, 1789) - scarlet tanager (male with summer plumage) (mount, Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA).

The scarlet tanager is a brilliantly red-colored passerine bird that summers in temperate eastern North America. Very few of the >200 species in the tanager family (Thraupidae) inhabit temperate North America - most tanagers are nonmigratory tropical to subtropical forms. Breeding males in summer plumage are the only members of this species that are brilliantly scarlet-colored. The males gradually lose their red coloration as boreal winters arrive. Scarlet tanagers winter in the Amazon Basin and northern South America. They are principally insectivores and frugivores.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Passeriformes, Thraupidae or Cardinalidae

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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.

However, birds are evolutionarily derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds first appeared in the Triassic or Jurassic, depending on which avian paleontologist you ask. They inhabit a wide variety of terrestrial and surface marine environments, and exhibit considerable variation in behaviors and diets.