Birds are dinosaurs. This is how scientists know : Brief Wave

Fossil casting of Archaeopteryx, a therapod dinosaur that lived all the way through the Overdue Jurassic length (round 150 million years in the past). Many fossils of Archaeopteryx come with impressions of feathers.

James L. Amos/Getty Pictures

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James L. Amos/Getty Pictures

While you image a dinosaur, what does it appear to be? Possibly you recall to mind four-legged herbivores like Apatosaurus or Triceratops. Possibly you consider massive armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus or Stegosaurus. However for Jingmai O’Connor, the dinosaurs she research – glance much more like birds. “For those who checked out an artist’s reconstruction of one thing like Velociraptor or Microraptor or a small feathered theropod dinosaur very intently associated with birds, you may see that it just about appears to be like the similar as a hen,” O’Connor says. “I imply, there is some structural variations in proportions and a few minor variations within the skeleton. … However relating to the plumage, the comfortable tissues overlaying the frame, it will have appeared very, very birdlike.”

O’Connor is a dinosaur paleobiologist and the affiliate curator of fossil reptiles on the Box Museum of Chicago. She particularly research theropods, a gaggle of two-legged dinosaurs that incorporates the whole lot from T. rexes to hummingbirds. As a result of sure, birds are dinosaurs, she says. They had been the one staff of dinosaurs to continue to exist the Cretaceous mass extinction round 65 million years in the past (to not be puzzled with the Permian-Triassic mass extinction that took place some 250 million years in the past). How did the ones birds continue to exist – and why? O’Connor calls this query the “million-dollar query of dinosaur paleobiology,” as a result of scientists do not precisely know. However one key speculation is that birds are merely extraordinarily well-adapted to continue to exist. “There is simply such a lot of bizarre issues concerning the body structure of birds, and it is almost definitely those options that permit them to continue to exist this environmental disaster,” O’Connor says. “They have got extremely environment friendly respiration programs. They have got a shockingly environment friendly digestive machine this is shorter, extra light-weight, extra environment friendly than a mammalian digestive machine … they’ve very increased metabolic charges and they’ve those very extraordinary expansion patterns.” O’Connor, for one, is overjoyed via all of those evolutionary adjustments researchers can in finding within the fossil document. It is a reminder of simply how advanced evolution may also be — and that complexity is a part of what makes paleobiology a laugh.

Produce other dinosaur questions you wish to have us to get to the bottom of? E-mail us at shortwave@npr.org — we might love to listen to from you! Pay attention to Brief Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Pay attention to each episode of Brief Wave sponsor-free and beef up our paintings at NPR via signing up for Brief Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave. This episode was once produced via Hannah Chinn. It was once edited via our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. The engineer was once Jimmy Keeley. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Collin Campbell is our senior vp of podcasting technique.