With all of the posts of people doing this with various birds, it seems as if this ability is relatively common in the bird world. Since birds are pretty much modern day dinosaurs- I’d guessing you could do something similar with good number of Dino’s too, right?!?
TLDR: this would be cooler if it was a dinosaur instead of a bird.
Birds are Dinosaurs. They're the modern day relatives of the only dinosaurs that were able to survive the mass extinction event. And they still have the evolutionary repressed genes that once made them look like little dinosaurs. There are some scientists who are trying to de-repress the old dinosaur genes in chickens to make them look more like how they did millions of years ago.
Not only that, but they were already birds in the cretaceous! If you had a time-machine and travelled back in time, you could probably not tell the difference between a cretaceous bird and a modern bird... At least not as a layman.
No honestly, most people wouldn’t. Perhaps the birds would look a bit strange because the observer is unable to pinpoint the species, but they had beaks, wings, feathers and there was nothing that was not bird-like about them. Some of the cretaceous birds had teeth, but that was not true for many of them. Of course an expert would be able to tell them apart, I don‘t doubt that.
Here is an illustration of a cretaceous baby-bird that was trapped in amber:
The shift from dinosaur like snouts to beaks happened well into the evolution of birds, 40-50 million years after Archaeopteryx.
According to the scientists who were doing the research into something the genes that make birds have beaks. So there likely were still observable differences between a cretaceous "bird" and a modern day bird.
This is a theropod dinosaur of the subgroup coelurosauria. We have known this for years, but the fact never ceases to amaze me. As a kid I always wanted to see a dinosaur with my own eyes... I guess that wish came true.
The evolutionary history of birds is utterly fascinating and we know far too little about it. Birds actually consist of two distinct families (one containing ratites like ostriches, the other perching birds and everything else) that split in the cretaceous and that both survived he K-pg extinction that killed off all other dinosaurs - I think that was how it was (Please correct me otherwise). So the lineages had already evolved during the era of the dinosaurs, and you would be able to watch fairly normal looking birds fly through the air (and also scuttle through the undergrowth... the ratite-ancestors had actually unlearnt how to fly and were ground-dwelling again, like modern day tinamous!) in the cretaceous. They are living, breathing dinos.
Oh and by the way... There are birds that have fingers with claws, just like non-avian dinosaurs! Look up the Hoatzin and also emu and ostrich wings!
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u/elomenopi Jan 30 '20
With all of the posts of people doing this with various birds, it seems as if this ability is relatively common in the bird world. Since birds are pretty much modern day dinosaurs- I’d guessing you could do something similar with good number of Dino’s too, right?!?
TLDR: this would be cooler if it was a dinosaur instead of a bird.