Eat a Dinosaur

When you sit down to carve your turkey this Thanksgiving, take a moment to reflect on the fact that birds are dinosaurs.

We've all grown up thinking of dinosaurs as big lumbering reptiles—an image that has been further popularized in movies like Jurassic Park and nicknames like "thunder lizard."

But by the mid-1990s, this story began to shift as scientists started to realize that dinosaurs actually have a lot more in common with birds than reptiles. And then, over the following decades, a rash of astonishing new fossils from China and new technologies for analyzing these fossils have only deepened our understanding of the link between dinosaurs and birds.

It's now known that many dinosaurs, including popular dinosaurs like velociraptors and at least some species of Tyrannosaurus, were covered in feathers rather than scales! It's time to toss out old definitions of "dinosaur" as one big monolithic group and realize that bird-like (avian) dinosaurs existed alongside reptile-like (non-avian) dinosaurs. But even this distinction is fading as even more bird-like features, including feathers, are being discovered on non-avian dinosaur fossils.

Furthermore, the presence of insulating feathers, along with evidence that dinosaur bones grew relatively quickly, suggests that dinosaurs were warm-blooded like fast-moving birds, rather than cold-blooded like sluggish reptiles.

So how can we explain the fact that scaly skin is found on both reptiles and some dinosaurs? People have long assumed that dinosaurs and reptiles are related because they both have scaly skin, but some experts now consider this is a result of convergent evolution rather than evidence of a direct evolutionary relationship.

This ancient lineage started when archosaurs, the ancestors of dinosaurs and crocodilians, first appeared around 230 million years ago. Over millions of years, during a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, archosaurs split into different groups, including the ancestors of modern reptiles, along with an immense variety of avian and non-avian dinosaurs. Then a massive comet slammed into the earth 65 million years ago and killed all the dinosaurs except for a small number of feathered dinosaurs that survived and later evolved into all our modern birds.

Ultimately, this means that reptiles are only very distantly related to dinosaurs, and all the birds that fill our lives and grace our dinners are simply smaller, more evolved versions of the first feathered dinosaurs.

I am thankful that this Thanksgiving Day we all have a chance to share delicious dinosaurs with our families and friends!