• Question: Hi Fiona whats the closest living Animal to a Dinosaur

    Asked by aidan13 to Fiona on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Fiona Heesen

      Fiona Heesen answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Hi aidan13,

      What a great question! Birds are the most direct descendents to dinosaurs. Scientists used fossil records to identify birds as having evolved from dinosaurs during the Jurassic period (which started about 201 million years ago!). I used to always think that lizards were closer as they look like little dinosaurs, but turns out science has proved that wrong!

      Thanks for the question 🙂

      Fiona

Comments

  • Photo: Kev

    Kev commented on :

    Just to add to Fiona’s excellent reply with something I find really cool. Because birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, we can (and do) actually regard them as a type of dinosaur! That means that technically speaking the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, most of them did but one group, the birds, survived and split into the thousands of species we see today. As an aside, we also now know that some dinosaurs (including such wonderful animals as Velociraptor) even had feathers! If you watch birds walking about and the way they look, I personally think you can still see some ‘dinosaur’ in their behaviour, but have a look some time and see what you think 🙂

  • Photo: Fiona

    Fiona commented on :

    Thanks Kev – great addition 🙂 I think it is so interesting to consider birds as a type of dinosaur 😀