Dinosaurs did not go extinct, they were active in the sky, became human pets, and were even brought to the dinner table.
What's going on? Please go with Qin Xinli, the director of the Ai Qu Detective Institute, to find out:
Dinosaurs are known to have been described as extinct when an asteroid hit Earth.
Extinction means that the population of dinosaurs died without descendants.
But we should not be surprised today that we are told that dinosaurs did not go extinct, that their descendants are still active in the skies of our time, that some have become human pets, and that they have even been brought to the human table.
Because these dinosaurs are the birds we see now.
A scientist published paper in the journal Science says that after analyzing protein fragments of 68 million-year-old tyrannosaurs and comparing them with protein sequences from 21 modern species, it was confirmed that dinosaurs and birds shared a common ancestor.
In the vernacular, the dinosaurs of the past were related to modern birds.
Scientists have long suspected that birds are the closest surviving relatives of dinosaurs, based on the fact that the birds and dinosaurs found to be very similar in skeletal morphology.
The study confirmed the relationship between birds and dinosaurs at the molecular level.
Later, scientists boldly announced that birds are dinosaurs, dinosaurs are not extinct, and the extinction is non-bird dinosaurs.
Today's definition of "Dinosaur" is this: Dinosaur refers to the Triceratops, the most recent common ancestor of modern birds and Lepidoptera and all of its descendants, and roughly divides dinosaurs into birds and non-avian dinosaurs.
Non-avian dinosaurs once lived in the Mesozoic Era (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous) and were all extinct 65 million years ago.
Non-avian dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, thunderstorm, stegosaurus, trichosperaurus, ankylosaur, etc.
And the birds that live in modern times are also dinosaurs, not evolved from dinosaurs, just as it cannot be said that humans evolved from mammals, because humans are mammals.
Scientists speculate that when the asteroid hit the earth, the relatively large non-avian dinosaurs were the most likely to go extinct, and then the small non-avian dinosaurs gradually went extinct, while some birds at that time managed to survive (of course, many bird species went extinct at that time).
The catastrophe caused by the impact of the asteroid on the earth, when most of the earth's biological species were destroyed, and how some birds survived is still a mystery.
Nowadays, scientists can point out that birds are in the same position as dinosaurs on the phylogenetic tree based on a series of characteristics, in research and comparison, and the reason why scientists believe that birds are dinosaurs is not limited to a single conclusive evidence, but that there is "many pieces of evidence put together", thus concluding that "birds are dinosaurs".
Let's take a look at the birds "dinosaurs" that lived in the same era as non-avian dinosaurs.
Birds that lived in the Cretaceous Period were Patagonian birds.
There is also the primitive Hot River Bird (one of the most primitive and earliest birds).
Found in about 99 million years of amber in northern Myanmar, one found the smallest archaic bird to date and the smallest dinosaur in history (smaller than today's smallest hummingbird in terms of skull size).
In fact, birds and non-avian dinosaurs are not completely distinct, because some non-avian dinosaurs also have feathers or wings. For example, the Chinese bird dragon (the first non-avian dinosaur to be determined to have feathers) lived in the Cretaceous Period.
All modern birds are dinosaurs (but not all dinosaurs are birds), has become the consensus of the scientific community, so it can be said that dinosaurs are still active in the sky today, that is, flying birds, some dinosaurs have become human pets (parrots, ornamental pigeons), and some dinosaurs have also been served on the human table (chickens, ducks and geese).
Text/Qinxin Pear
Graph/Network