Dave Hone

But no.

But I think an awful lot of people know and are now kind of used to it as an idea.

So what's evolutionary, the connection between birds and dinosaurs?

I mean, they literally are in the same way that we are apes and mammals.

Birds are dinosaurs.

The...

direct, if you trace back the evolution of all the birds, so hummingbirds and albatross and ostrich and kiwi and parrots and pelicans and penguins and whatever else, and take them down to their ancestral point, and then go back quite a few more million years...

their nearest relish to them is a dinosaur.

It is actually something very close to Velociraptor, or at least a small version of Velociraptor.

So the birds have literally descended from dinosaurs, therefore they are dinosaurs.

We have literally descended from other apes, we are apes.

It is that form of evolutionary connection.

Feathers are in Tyrannosaurs, so feathers go back at least... So ironically,

because the fossil record is very incomplete.

Most of the things that are closest to birds, we know from the early and late Cretaceous.

So the last kind of 50 million years of dinosaur evolution up to the extinction.

And actually birds almost certainly go back another 50 million years.

So birds did not appear as a result of the dinosaurs going extinct.

Birds lived alongside the dinosaurs for a hundred million years.

The birds were not new on the scene, and it's all like, oh, the dinosaurs died, and from the ashes rose the birds.