Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Many of you have learned about the meteorite that scientists say hit the earth 66 million years ago and killed off many dinosaur species. But some dinosaurs survived, and the birds you see flying around today are their direct descendants! In this episode we trace the connection between modern birds and prehistoric dinosaurs. Other questions include:
- Were any dinosaurs mammals?
- How did bird dinosaurs survive?
- Are crocodiles related to dinosaurs?
- Did dinosaurs have feathers? How do we know?
- Did all dinosaurs lay eggs?
Our guest is Dr. Emily Bamforth, curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada.
Download our learning guides: PDF | Google Slide | Transcript
- People who study fossils are called paleontologists.
- Dinosaurs and crocodiles shared an ancestor that looked like a crocodile. Many reptiles evolved from that species.
- No dinosaurs were mammals. There were mammal species that lived at the time of the dinosaurs (those mammals were much smaller than many mammals are today), but dinosaurs were reptiles, a completely different classification of animals from mammals.
- Many dinosaur species were wiped out more than 60 million years ago after a meteorite hit Earth near modern day Mexico. Scientists think that no species bigger than a dog survived the mass extinction that followed because there simply wasn’t enough food for them to eat after ash in the atmosphere blocked out the sun.
- Smaller animals that could eat things like seeds and insects could survive, and went on to evolve into species that we now recognize.
- Other animals, like sharks and horseshoe crabs, survived because they lived in the ocean and were not as directly impacted by the meteorite.
- Some dinosaur species evolved into birds. Scientists have confirmed this connection within just the past few decades after finding a fossil of an archaeopteryx, a dinosaur with feathers.
- All dinosaur species probably laid eggs, which is another sign that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
