Bird is the d-word

Did you know …

That birds are basically dinosaurs? It’s true! 

Birds are the direct genetic descendants of prehistoric dinosaurs! In fact, many scientists refer to birds as “avian dinosaurs”! Neat, huh? Of course, a term like that is sort of begging the question, but you know how scientists can be. (If you don’t know how scientists can be, this is how they can be: they can be a bunch of jags who won't let you use their lab equipment even when you sent a message to their publicly available university email address saying that you wanted to use it, and they also want to prove how smart they are all the time, which is a bad move if you asked me.)

It should be pointed out, however, that if birds are in fact dinosaurs, they are also probably the worst of the dinosaurs. Most of them aren’t even strong enough to pick up a baby, much less eat it in one gulp, and you can’t even ride a bird (with one or two exceptions). Remember that scene in Jurassic Park where the chubby kid who was inexplicably at a remote paleontological dig pointed out that velociraptors were kind of lame because they were basically big turkeys? He/she was just about right. Turkeys aren’t very cool. Nor are velociraptors for the most part—you’ll find that actual velociraptors were about the size of a dog, and were probably covered in feathers (that’s like having the same red hair as your great nephew, who spends his weekends at the mall trying to look up skirts on the escalator). But at least velociraptors had teeth.