A Quote by David M. Raup
It has been argued that dinosaurs did not die out, but just evolved wings and flew away. At a certain level, this reasoning is sound.... Birds, as a group, did descend from dinosaurs and ... all 8,600 species of birds living today carry some inheritance from their reptilian ancestors.
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Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.
Birds are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they're vicious.
The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.
In pre-school, I was drawing dinosaurs - I was huge into dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist, not a cartoonist or a filmmaker or anything like that - just a paleontologist. So I would draw dinosaurs.
The evidence is overwhelming that birds are dinosaurs.
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.
The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.
The cyber threat has evolved dramatically since I left DOJ in 2005, partly just reflecting how much the digital world has itself evolved over that time. Back then, 'tweeting' was something only birds did.
Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.
Dragons are basically our pipe-dreams of what birds would be if they still looked liked ancient dinosaurs but followed evolution's flight plan.
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
Dinosaurs grew feathers for heat regulation, but the ones that started flying started becoming birds.
I did not set out to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm a particle physicist, and I was actually thinking about dark matter along with some collaborators.
By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
Instead of regarding birds as deriving from dinosaurs, Scansoriopteryx reinstates the validity of regarding them as a separate class uniquely avian and non-dinosaurian.
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