Читать книгу Birds For Dummies - Gina Spadafori - Страница 21

One of the more unusual aspects to consider when taking a bird into your life: This association is likely to be the closest you’ll ever get to sharing space with a dinosaur. Although scientists once figured that reptiles were next of kin to dinosaurs, they now believe birds are even closer. Birds are descended from a small meat-eating dinosaur that walked on two legs. The link between the two was made with the discovery of Archaeopteryx (meaning “ancient wing”), a Jurassic-period fossil of a creature that was part bird and part dinosaur.

If you have a hard time making the leap between birds and dinosaurs (the word dinosaur means “terrible lizard,” after all, not “terrible bird”), check out the foot of an ostrich sometime — but not closely. The claws alone may give you Jurassic Park jitters. Scientists have learned that many of the dinosaurs once considered to be reptiles actually had feathers. Based on fragmented DNA recovered from a T. rex fossil found in the United States, one published study found that the closest living relative to a T. rex is, yes, the chicken! We love that.

Photograph courtesy of D. Davidson Harpur