Yes. This is a living dinosaur.

#BirdsAreDinosaurs https://twitter.com/DARosenthal/status/1245390172742508544

The close relatives of modern chickens lived alongside T. rex. #WonderChicken.

The bones of those ancient #mesozoic chickens look pretty darn similar to modern ones, so the living animals may have looked super weird as well. Soft tissues make #dinosaurs STYLISH.

Here's a #dinosaur called a Black #Curassow (Crax alector). She is also in the chicken group. She comes from the tropical forests of South America.

Other #bird groups that were around in the late #Cretaceous or shortly after are alive today as well, & also give us a window into the evolutionary tendencies of #dinos. When running #dinosaurs like #Gallimimus went extinct, #ratite #birds quickly re-evolved this body plan.

Turns out, the bipedal #theropod #dinosaur body plan is really great for efficiently running around, evading predators (or kicking them), & gobbling up anything that can be gulped down, even without flying.

It's also great for weird wiggly floofy dust baths. Apparently.

The point here is that there's a lot we can learn from birds that is often overlooked, and the more fossil evidence of soft tissue we find, the more non-bird dinosaurs show us they had bird-like traits: from chicken-like combs on Edmontosaurus, to feathers on early plant eaters.

Even early theropods and giant sauropod dinosaurs have air sacs throughout their vertebrae and skulls, just like modern birds.

My collaborator Matt Wedel likes to say "If we had discovered the feathered dinosaurs first, we would just call all of these animals ancient birds."