Fifty years ago, it would have seemed strange for a paleontologist to write a book about birds, but today we know why the pairing makes sense. Birds are dinosaurs: it’s as literally true as saying humans are mammals. The brontosaurus and the triceratops might have been wiped off the face of the planet 66 million years ago by an asteroid the size of Mount Everest — just about anything bigger than a dog was — but the dinosaurs never really went away. There are probably a few perched outside your window right now, gathering twigs, hunting insects, and chirping.
In the first half of the new book The Story of Birds, paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who teaches at the University of Edinburgh, makes the argument that dinosaurs are much more bird-like than you probably imagine. Many had colorful feathers, yes, but they also shared similar skeletal structures, talons, and even lungs. Unfortunately, this section of the book is a bit slow-going. That may seem like unfair criticism for a popular science primer covering hundreds of millions of years, but I found myself zoning out as the Latin name of one extinct species bled into the Latin name of another extinct species. Please don’t quiz me on the difference between coelurosaurs and dromaeosaurids. I’m sure their skeletal structures differ in subtle but important ways: I just can’t remember how. Brusatte includes a wealth of interesting facts, but every time I looked back at a completed chapter, I felt as though I had only picked up a few.Things really get going when that asteroid crashes to Earth. Here, Brusatte’s skills as a writer are on display. Consider his description of what is undoubtedly the worst day in the history of our planet. After the asteroid hits with the power of a billion nuclear bombs, “Tsunamis ravaged the coasts, earthquakes shattered the ground, fires engulfed the forests, and windstorms howled. Sonic booms echoed for hours on end. Volcanos belched up poison from deep underground, and the rain became acidic. Bullets of molten glass literally poured down from the heavens.” Trillions of living beings died in the ensuing decades as 75% of species — not animals, species — went extinct.
