Travel back in time with us, 231.4 million years ago, to the late Triassic period, and the age of the dinosaurs.
Hey birders, what if I told you that we don’t have to cross breed frogs and DNA from fossilized mosquito stomachs to see the closest thing to living dinosaurs, but that there are dinosaurs in your backyard right now.
Not quite…
You might not realize it, but birds are more than just similar to dinosaurs, they literally ARE dinosaurs.
“But wait, dinosaurs are huge, dangerous and featherless, millions of years old, and famously extinct"
NOT TRUE!
Well not entirely true
Almost all dinosaurs definitely did go extinct 66 Million years ago, however the resilient genus Theropoda lived on to breed and evolve, adapting to the new, post-asteroid world.
Perhaps surprisingly, famous flying dinosaurs like the pterodactyl, are barely connected to birds at all, learning flight and evolving with completely separate lineages. Instead, Theropods, a genus of dinosaur that include Archaeopteryx, Velociraptor, and the mighty Trex, are the predecessors to all bird species that live on to this day.
We might think of these dinosaurs as scaly, reptilian monsters, but we can blame Hollywood for that. The reality is that theropods were more bird than alligator, complete with feathers and all!
After an asteroid larger than Mt Everest collided with Earth over 66 Million years ago off the coast of Mexico, at what is now the Chicxulub Impact Crater - a hole in the Earth with a diameter of 112 miles, or 270 billion square feet - 75% of all life on Earth came to an end. Large animals with bigger food demands, and animals that couldn’t fly or swim had little to no hope of making it out alive, however, smaller theropods had a unique advantage with their size, omnivoric diet, and ability to migrate easily and find sustenance in safer places. This advantage allowed them to survive, thrive and propagate, eventually becoming the birds we know and love today.
It's hard to believe that our adorable little Juncos are close relatives to the mighty T-Rex, but the world works in mysterious ways.
