From the tone of your answer, you sound pretty confident that chickens are not dinosaurs-- perhaps you have some authoritative information on this? If so, can you direct me to it? My google-fu deserts me.
If you are hung up on the fact that lemurs still exist, use the word prosimians instead.
you sound pretty confident that chickens are not dinosaurs
That's because I'm pretty confident that this:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/chicken.jpg
is not this:
http://domz60.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/dinosaur.jpg
If you really need something to prove that, I think we are dealing with bigger problems than can ever be resolved within this discussion.
They are certainly related however, and even a layman can see this even without looking at the evolutionary hip structure. That said they are far enough apart that calling a bird a dinosaur is the same as calling you a lemur.
If you ask me, all dinosaurs were birds and some survive until today, makes more sense then some dinosaurs were birds and it's just those that survive.
But I'm not a paleontologists.
And what bugs me is that we have all manner of lizards, even huge turtles and crocodiles and warm blooded birds, but not a single small dino.
There being no huge dinos makes sense, but if we have Nile crocodiles and ostriches, why not one chicken sized dino?
Um, no. Birds are members of the larger dinosaur family the same way you are a member of the primate family. They are dinosaurs in the way that you are a primate, but they aren't dinosaurs in the way that you aren't a lemur.
There was a time when a whole host of other animals were a part of this family, but they have died off. The entire group of animals is collectively known as dinosaurs, but since birds evolved and were proven distinct prior to the extinction, it is correct to say that birds are a subset of dinosaurs, not that all dinosaurs were birds.
People who speculate that such a split is incorrectly classified, and that birds are simply evolved dinosaurs have a pretty big uphill climb in my opinion. The presence of fossils that show that what we would classify as birds living before the extinction is a pretty major hurdle.
*a small theropod, most probably an ancestor of birds
The problem is that that not even all Avialans are "birds", let alone all dinosaurs.
So, yeah birds "descended" from dinosaurs, so did a lot of other stuff. I don't think anyone disputes this.