Living Dinosaurs

As far as dominating a planet goes, the dinosaurs did an amazing job. The Age of Dinosaurs lasted for nearly 200 million years—something like a thousand times as long as modern humans have existed.

Many of them grew to enormous sizes, leaving them without natural predators of their own, perpetuating a virtuous size cycle. There were lots of smaller, more adaptable dinosaurs, too. They were diverse and resilient.

In order to survive for so long as a group, dinosaurs laid eggs with a hard shell. This meant they could be laid on land, which proved to be a major advantage over amphibians.

Suddenly, 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid ripped through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour, and smashed onto the surface of the earth. The same energy as billions of nukes was released instantly, leaving a crater in the ground wider than most US states.

The impact site was decimated in a bright flash, but the entire planet was in for utter chaos. Tsunamis and earthquakes the likes of which we humans can only imagine radiated outward.

An incredible amount of dust and debris blocked the sun completely at first, and even as the dust began to dissipate, wildfires spread, acid rain fell, and the food chains of nearly every living thing were disrupted. Butterfly effects led to mass extinctions.

The reign of the dinosaurs was over.

Or was it?

Here’s a little-known fact: birds are all—each and every one—descendants of those dinosaurs.

That’s right! Dinosaurs. Birds.

The seeds for this observation began with the study of a particular fossil found in the 1860s in Germany. This Archaeopteryx displayed features characteristic of both birds and dinosaurs. It had feathers, a wishbone, and limbs like a bird; but it also had a long bony tail, teeth, and a three-fingered hand.

Thomas Henry Huxley, a huge advocate of of Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution, called attention to the similarities between Archaeopteryx and birds living today. He noticed that there were other similarities between birds and other dinosaurs, especially theropods—dinosaurs with hollow bones and three-toad feet.

Huxley was onto something here, but too much of the popular imagination already painted dinosaurs as enormous, slow, cold-blooded reptiles. Birds are (pretty much) none of these things. It took a century for this paradigm to slowly begin to change.

In the 1970s, many more feathered dinosaur fossils were found, this time in China. Dinosaurs with feathers were harder to ignore now, and John Ostrom—a dedicated and insightful paleontologist working at Yale—helped to show that many dinosaurs were actually fast-moving and agile, not sluggish and lumbering.

Ostrom’s work was used most famously in the movie Jurassic Park. A whole new generation of kids began to think of dinosaurs as quick, variously sized, and warm blooded.

Today, it is a well-established concept in paleontology that birds are the only surviving lineage of theropod dinosaurs, having diversified into the myriad species we see today after the mass extinction event 66 million years ago.

Not all dinosaurs went on to become birds, but every bird today is a living dinosaur.

I can’t help but think about this every time I do a little bird-watching from my back yard. Those little living dinosaurs are on full display for me, exhibiting their little dinosaur characteristics and living their best bird life.

Here’s a twist at the end: what was your favorite dinosaur when you were a kid?