EVOLUTION MADE BIRDS from dinosaurs. And as we’ve seen, it happened slowly, as one lineage of theropod dinosaurs acquired the characteristic features and behaviors of today’s birds piecemeal, over tens of millions of years. A T. rex didn’t just mutate into a chicken one day, but rather, the transition was so gradual that dinosaurs and birds just seem blend into each other on the family tree. Velociraptor, Deinonychus, and Zhenyuanlong are on that “non-bird” side of the genealogy, but were they around today, we would probably consider them just another type of bird, no stranger than a turkey or
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