Birds: The Dino Edition

Birds are Dinosaurs.

You read that right. Birds ARE dinosaurs.

Birds are not descendants of dinosaurs. Birds are not evolved FROM dinosaurs.

Birds ARE dinosaurs. They are therapods that have taken to the skies.

To take a break from all my “bird reading,” I recently picked up a book on a topic I thought was far from Ornithology: Paleontology. The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte.

I was coasting through the book with the confidence of ignorance. I was gleeful that all I read would be news for me. I did not know Dino1 from Dino2. I knew the usual rowdy sheeters – brutes like T Rex, Velociraptors, Tarbosaurus, and Allosaurus. Then I knew the vegetarian tanks. Triceratops and Stegasaurus. One of Mira’s favorite Dino books has these characters. There is Travis the Troodon, Gal the Galimimus, and Pete the Plesiosaur. We all, of course, know Dippy the Diplodocus, Bronco the Brachiosaurus, and Bob the Brontosaurus.

Pretty decent, right? Dino 101.

No. The book upended all my first-grader understanding of Dinos by informing me right off the bat that some of these dudes never even met each other. They all lived on a timeline stretching across some hundreds of millions of years, the book casually informed the reader. And the world was not the same too, apparently. The Triassic era was all about super volcanoes (some of them spewing liquid hot magma for 600,000 years continuously), megamonsoons and a single continental mass. Then there came the Jurassic era (we can all thank Uncle Spielberg for our knowledge there), and by the time the Cretaceous era rolled over, wham-splat-sploosh! The end.

First, they crawled, then they ate and beat each other up, Steve was carrying on. There were a few chapters of evolutionary speak, which honestly seemed quite mumbo jumbo to me, because the real correlations seem to happen only when they dig out some cool bones in obscure places.

As I said, coasting.

But by the time I was reading chapters on the Cretaceous era, I was starting to distinguish some of these critters. The Velociraptors and the T-Rexes were beginning to look and walk a little too familiarly. I had to take a coffee break and come back to the book.

Last rainy Sunday evening in Bangalore, I was staring out of my window at the gushing rainwater falling from the eaves of my house, wondering, “Is it just me, or does the T – Rex look like an oversize pissed off chicken that barely escaped the soup treatment?”

Apparently, I wasn’t very far off from the truth. The T-Rex evolved to walk upright, had fused its clavicle into a wishbone, remodelled its advanced air sacs for better oxygen supplies throughout the body, formed three-pointed toes, and sported feathers.

Thats practically a jumbo chicken nugget in the Colonel Sanders cookbook.

A bit of cursory googling brought up articles with a sufficient mix of pictures, fossils, and family trees from reputed publishers like Berkeley and The Audubon Society. They all seem to be hysterically hand-waving and signalling from their corners of the specialist avian worlds that birds ARE dinosaurs.

I’m not complaining, though. I’ve suddenly become an amateur paleontologist without doing anything. Ah, the beauty of science.

The next time I’m wondering about the remarkably wicked-looking claws of a Greater Coucal, I’ll at least know they are the end result of an exceptionally long process of evolution, and that those talons are evolutionary byproducts of some serious firepower from before the asteroid hit.

Who knew paleontology is a gateway science to cuckoo land?