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April 9, 2021 - June 24, 2023
Petrified Forest National Park,
Dinosaur park i should visit
Nigersaurus,
Someone did not think this one through
For whatever reason—and we don’t yet know the answer—no dinosaurs were able to do what whales did: start on the land, change their bodies into swimming machines, and make a living in the water.
Seagulls, and all other birds, evolved from dinosaurs. That makes them dinosaurs. Put another way, birds can trace their heritage back to the common ancestor of dinosaurs, and therefore are every bit as dinosaurian as T. rex, Brontosaurus, or Triceratops, the same way my cousins and I are Brusattes because we trace our lineage back to the same grandfather. Birds are simply a subgroup of dinosaurs, just like the tyrannosaurs or the sauropods—one of the many branches on the dinosaur family tree.
Lovely
I often get people who try to argue with me: sure, birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, they say, but they are so different from T. rex, Brontosaurus, and the other familiar dinosaurs that we shouldn’t classify them in the same group. They’re small, they have feathers, they can fly—we shouldn’t call them dinosaurs. On the face of it, that may seem like a reasonable argument. But I always have a quick retort up my sleeve. Bats look and behave a whole lot differently than mice or foxes or elephants, but nobody would argue that they’re not mammals. No, bats are just a weird type of mammal
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Hurrah
Birds are a type of theropod; they are rooted in that group of ferocious meat-eaters that most famously includes T. rex and Velociraptor and also many of the other predators that we’ve come across:
Neat
There are no other groups of animals—living or extinct—that share these things with birds or theropods: this must mean that birds came from theropods.
Walter Alvarez.
Look into his books if he has any
