The fact that birds are the living members of the dinosaur family has been firmly established thanks to many discoveries in my lifetime, although it was suspected and stated by very early dinosaur paleontologists. There have been dinosaur books written with this perspective.
Honestly, as a life long dinosaur kid, I do not understand how everyone is not excited about this all the time. THERE HAVE BEEN DINOSAURS ALL AROUND ME ALL OF MY LIFE!!!!!! With that knowledge, and a lot of other cool stuff, presented so well in previous books by this author, I needed to get his latest one as soon as I could.
I will be having a a stronger feeling of excitement, well above the already considerable level, now that I have finished reading Dr. Steve Brusatte's The Story of Birds: An Evolutionary History of the Dinosaurs That Live Among Us. This is truly a dinosaur book. However, while most of those end with "and then the asteroid hit, but the birds survived," this one follows their interesting and sometimes wild evolutionary pathways all the way through to today.
Birds... which I feel the need to happily say, yet again, are dinosaurs... are incredibly cool.
And also incredibly weird.
Naming groups of animals is also weird, and improved knowledge of genetics changed the understanding about how different species are connected. In fact, looking at it one oddly angled way, a velociraptor could fall under the title "bird." Birds closest living relatives are the other archosaurs, the crocodilians.
(Also, what is a "reptile" causes huge problems and arguments, because if a bird isn't a reptile, then neither is a turtle. And don't get them started on what falls under "fish," because it is just about everything.)
A whole lot of the evolutionary items we think about as specific bird traits evolved in other dinosaurs before birds existed. Feathers (for insulation), wings (for display), thermoregulation (for activity levels), lung efficiency that draws oxygen on both inhalation and exhalation (for metabolism). These are all dinosaur things that ended up making birds birds. Developing in the egg, modern birds will pass through several "dinosaur stages" before hatching.
Mammals, reptiles and amphibians all had their "unusual and giant relatives in prehistoric times." One would think that the age of dinosaurs would have covered that for birds... and it did. However, after the asteroid, birds joined in the race to fill all the ecological niches in many (and often humungous) ways. Besides the most famous (and less prehistoric) moas and elephant birds, there were other giant, flightless monstrosities, such as the axe beaked "terror birds" and an equally massive group scientists nicknamed, "demon ducks."
In the air was pelagornis, an albatross like soarer with a beak that had "false pointy teeth" in it to grab fish and a wingspan matching Cessna airplanes. There was also a ginormous vulture with a slightly smaller wingspan (still over twenty feet) but heavier that stood as tall as a human.
And if the five foot tall penguins on that sign near the "penguin wheel of death" in the Bronx Zoo sounded frightening, how about their colossal cousins that stood six and a half feet tall and weighed as much as a gorilla. They filled the top seagoing carnivore niches until the bigger pinnipeds and cetaceans evolved.
Modern birds are just as cool and unusual as their ancestors. They need brainpower for their complex lives, and evolved a much higher density of neurons in their brains than mammals have to make up for the size reduction needed for flight. True songbirds (which also include the corvids - crows and ravens) don't instinctively know their songs, they need to learn them from older birds as part of a complex social structure. Parrots evolved learning vocalizations separately. Over thirty bird species have displayed some level of tool use.
As with his other books the coolness isn't only concentrated on the animals. Doctor Brusatte also includes information on the impressive individuals who found and figured out the information, as well as the interesting technology they used. All three elements are equally fascinating, but the birds are the star of the show here.
Birds can evolve to situations impressively fast. A couple of researchers studying on the Galapagos Islands, the location Darwin cited the multiple species of finches from in his most famous work, observed an entirely new species of finch develop in recent years.
One final bit of rambling concerning the fun and amazing facts about the dinosaurs surrounding us. Flight takes a huge amount of effort and energy, and birds will regularly evolve away from it whenever they can be safe on the ground. The original, and logical sounding, theory that a prehistoric, flightless ratite migrated to the southern hemisphere and then evolved into the different large, flightless species on southern continents today (ostriches, emus, cassowaries, rheas) was disproven by genetic testing. Instead, airborne prehistoric ratites flew to the southern continents on multiple occasions and then evolved separately into those different large, flightless birds of today.
There was one case in in the fossil record of a South Pacific island where members of a bird species migrated there by flying, had no ground predators, and evolved into a flightless species.
Then the entire island was consumed by the ocean, drowning all the land dwelling animals on it, including those birds.
After the island resurfaced, the exact same species of bird flew there again, settled and evolved into another flightless species.
Birds are awesome, and they are everywhere, and unfortunately, humanity is killing them at an insane rate every year. This is helped excessively by their cats, about two thirds of the human caused over 3 billion birds killed a year are by cats. Please keep your cats inside.
Wind turbines are only responsible for one tenth of one percent of the total number, pollution takes out more than twenty-two times that amount, making wind power a much safer alternative for our feathered friends.
We are constantly surrounded by living dinosaurs.
Seriously, why doesn't the whole world realize how awesome that is?
If they read The Story of Birds: An Evolutionary History of the Dinosaurs That Live Among Us, they would.
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