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Course: American Museum of Natural History > Unit 1

Lesson 3: Dinosaur extinction

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Are any dinosaurs still alive today?

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Many, shared, evolutionary characteristics can be found in the skeletons of birds and other dinosaurs. One can follow the development of these evolutionary innovations by following along the evolutionary tree of dinosaurs from larger groups into successively smaller ones. In an evolutionary sense, birds are a living group of dinosaurs because they descended from the common ancestor of all dinosaurs. Other than birds, however, there is no scientific evidence that any dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, are still alive. These, and all other nonavian dinosaurs became extinct at least 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

. Created by American Museum of Natural History.

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Skysilver_Gaming
Posted 10 years ago. Direct link to Skysilver_Gaming's post “According to the video, d...”
According to the video, does that mean that there are still living dinosaurs? Birds are dinosaurs?
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- Akash Perera
  Posted 9 years ago. Direct link to Akash Perera's post “Birds of prey are the eas...”
  Birds of prey are the easiest to tell that they are raptors
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  (1 vote)
♥ GoldenEagle ♥
Posted 9 years ago. Direct link to ♥ GoldenEagle ♥'s post “Why are birds dinosaurs?”
Why are birds dinosaurs?
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- Vidhuweera
  Posted 9 years ago. Direct link to Vidhuweera's post “Scientists (a website who...”
  Scientists (a website who says there scientists). Say that birds have spines, and wings. Which the category "Dinosauria" has. Not only that they are more related then dinos are to there wives! So the next time some dude says there are only bird dinos. Tell him there are more dinos then the Mesozoic! (Cause some scientist think Lizards are).
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Video transcript

Not only are dinosaurs still live today, you could be easily make an argument that they're more diverse than they ever have been. Living birds are dinosaurs, just like human beings are kind of primate, birds are a kind of dinosaur. Birds, based on the evidence we have, both in fossils and in comparison with living birds they probably branch off a group of, kind of, carnivorous dinosaurs we call the theropods, things that are closely related to to the animals like tyrannosaurus or oviraptor, the famous beaked dinosaur, and some of these other meat eating dinosaurs.