Washington Post: How to dissect your Thanksgiving dinosaur #dinosaurs #birds #thanksgiving

 

Happy Thanksgiving from ESCONI!  The Washington Post has a story and video that does a good job explaining why birds are dinosaurs and how you can see that in your turkey's skeleton this Thanksgiving.

On Thanksgiving, people will gather with their loved ones to share their gratitude for one another over a lavish meal. And in all likelihood, the centerpiece of this feast will be a dinosaur.

That’s right. Birds, like the turkey gracing your Thanksgiving table, are dinosaurs. They are the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction that wiped out T. rex, triceratops and other behemoths 65 million years ago.

Scientists got their first whiff of the bird-dinosaur connection in 1861, when they found a fossilized feathered dinosaur called archaeopteryx in Germany. But feathers aren’t our only clue that birds are dinosaurs. Since the 1800s, paleontologists have found a wealth of evidence to support this claim. And on Thanksgiving, you and your family can dissect your own personal dinosaur to see the evidence for yourself.

Shaena Montanari, a paleontologist and dinosaur expert, showed me and my friend Joe Hanson how to perform the dissection. You can follow along in a video Joe made for his YouTube channel, It’s Okay To Be Smart. We used a rotisserie chicken, but you find the exact same structures in the bones of your bird on Turkey Day.