It’s hard to believe that one of America’s favorite comfort foods is the closest relative to a dinosaur.
Growing up as a kid, I always loved dinosaurs - a lot of boys did. I would always watch the movie Jurassic Park and wish that I could somehow see a dinosaur of my own. This made me want to get reptilian pets like geckos and iguanas because I thought they were the closest thing to seeing a real live dinosaur. I also had a pet bird, and it turns out that he was my closest pet to a dinosaur.
As I grew up I was still fascinated by dinosaurs, although I have traded in my Jurassic Park pajamas since then. I wanted to learn where it is that dinosaurs came from and if they have any ancestors that still live among us.
The thing that allows birds to fly, besides their wings, is their hollow bones. They don’t have dense bones like humans; their bones are lighter and give them the ability to get off of the ground with a lot more ease than if a human were to have wings.
As dinosaur excavation became more prominent, people realized the bones they were digging up of these giant creatures were also hollow, which meant dinosaurs have more of a connection to birds than they do reptiles.
Movies project these giant creatures to have big scales and look like a lizard on steroids, but it is more widely believed in the paleontology field that dinosaurs actually had feathers. You can scratch what you thought a tyrannosaurus rex looked like and put a new image in your head. The closest relative to this famous dinosaur is a chicken, and according to The Guardian, chickens have the closest DNA match up to a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Don’t let the thought of a giant chicken running around make you feel like you would’ve been any safer. According to National Geographic, the Tyrannosaurus rex left behind bones that were 40 feet long. This animal was still one of the largest meat eating dinosaurs of its time.
Now when you go to watch any movie about dinosaurs, you’ll have a new outlook on what they look like, and when you see a bird flying around outside, just know that the small animal flying around was once one of the largest creatures to ever roam Earth.
Adam Wondrely is a junior studying creative writing and journalism. Know any more misconceptions about dinosaurs that most people don’t? Email him at aw922910@ohiou.edu.
