Is my bird a dinosaur?

Bird owners like to think that their birds are little dinosaurs. But when I was in school, we learned that the dinosaurs had gone extinct. We weren’t really sure why, but one theory said it was because they were ungainly, slow, and stupid. So what’s the story?

Way up the family tree from your bird.

Bird evolution 101

The relationship between birds and dinosaurs has been hotly debated for more than 150 years. Here I’ll present a very simplified version of that history. Prior to the time of Charles Darwin, scientists didn’t consider birds and reptiles to be related. Birds had feathers and flew, reptiles didn’t, and that was pretty much the end of it.