Science & Nature

Birds Are Dinosaurs: How a Family Tree That Spans T. Rex to Pigeons Informs Our Understanding of Life on Earth

Video: Produced by Nicole Cardos

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Shake any family tree, and a few skeletons are bound to fall out — that’s as true for birds as it is for people.

Except that for birds, the wacky cousin lurking in one of those branches is T. Rex.

Follow along as Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, points out where Archaeopteryx fits in this long lineage as she traces modern-day birds’ ancestry all the way back to the Age of Dinosaurs — an age that, because birds ARE dinosaurs, we’re all still living in.

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Read More:

• The Field Museum Now Has an Incredibly Rare Fossil Proving Birds Are Dinosaurs. Here’s a Behind-the-Scenes Look at How They Got It
• Where in the World is Archaeopteryx?
• Meet Jingmai O’Connor, the Punk Rock Paleontologist Who Leads the Field Museum’s Archaeopteryx Team

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