The statement you made, "individual dinosaurs did not turn into birds or reptiles" does not make sense to me when I was informed by this site that the fact that I am alive right now is because every ancestor whether it was human, primitive ape, whatever it was before that, going back to my origin of the first multi-cellular life lived long enough to reproduce is why I am here today.
Obviously my ancestors changed in appearance several times since its origin in early earth. At some point the offspring started to look less and less like they looked 1000 or more generations ago. Offspring are individuals that represent the group they are identified by.
I am not saying one day a dinosaur and the next it became a bird.