There’s a dead tree around here overlooking a swamp. In its upper branches, you see cormorants. Double-crested Cormorants, by name. Although they don’t have even a single, visible crest.
Today I looked at them and realized they’re dinosaurs.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to me or anybody. We’ve all heard that birds descended from pre-historic sci-fi monsters.
The only new thing is that today, the thought hit: Hey, these hulking birds didn’t descend from dinosaurs; they are dinosaurs.
A Nova rerun that I saw last night is responsible. I don’t want to get all scientific here, but it showed some guy in China hammering open a rock, and there was a dinosaur fossil flattened inside. The fossil had a faint indication of feathers.
A prototype dino-bird? Maybe. Feathers don’t stick around like bones do. We’re not sure who had them way back when, and who didn’t.
It got me thinking: What if this one little bird-like dinosaur wasn’t the only one that had feathers? What if all dinosaurs did?
Maybe T-Rex was feathered like an Osprey instead of walking around with bare reptilian skin. Maybe the dinosaurs we saw in Jurassic Park were based on incomplete interpretations of the fossil record.
Imagine how we’d picture dogs or bears if we never knew they had fur. Naked, and looking nothing much like dogs or bears.
But wait. Didn’t feathers evolve for flight?
Maybe not. Let’s ask an ostrich. Point is: what if feathers came first, maybe as a protective covering. And flight evolved later for the small, lightweight dinosaurs. Feathers just made it possible. Hell, that’s for the science geeks to work on. They’ll get it straight eventually.
Meanwhile, today when I saw cormorants I thought: living dinosaurs.
Later I saw a Great Blue Heron at the edge of the swamp. And Mourning Doves on a wire, a circling Turkey Vulture, a flock of Starlings. I saw a Kestrel on a traffic sign, and a couple of American Goldfinches on the wing.
I still thought: dinosaurs. Not just the prehistoric-looking cormorants. All birds. Including the chicken you’re having for dinner tonight.
Dinosaurs haven’t gone extinct; they’re singing outside your window and sizzling on your grill.
Nice idea, possibly true-maybe I should start telling my friends I go dinosaur watching on the weekends!
I believe all the research shows that feathers DID in fact evolve from scales as early bird sized dinos glided from trees like flying squirrels. Your doubts about this are valid though. As Jay says science doesn’t always know s***. I like your “ask an ostrich” idea.
Food for thought. In that regard, I had a bucket of extra crispy dinosaur for dinner tonite. Who’s at the top of the food chain now?
i read the jurassic….. dinosaur feathers? why not…science doesn’t know shit. the fact that we have two completely contradictory explanations in physics for explaining subatomic force and gravitational force is proof of that. everything is just a theory, a work in progress.