What do we know about dinosaurs now and, perhaps more interestingly, how do we know these things? Michael J. Benton lays it out in Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology . Origins, taxonomy, intelligence, reproduction, diet, locomotion, and, of course, the cause(s) of extinction are topics covered here.
Surely the most notable and surprising thing in our understanding of dinosaurs in the last couple of decades has been the discovery of dinosaur feathers. Colored feathers! (Good gravy, there were ginger dinosaurs!) With the added brain-expander that these feathered creatures were not fliers. They were using feathers for insulation and/or sexual attraction before feathers for flight.
Those scaly toes, those beaks! Most of the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago. But not all of them.
Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season by Roger F. Pasquier is a compendium of research. From migration to toughing it out, our feathered dinosaurs are no slouches when it comes to the cold. (The absence of cold, on the other hand, is already telling in our warming planet, especially for sea birds who depend on cold currents that enrich the seas at the base of their food chain.) There is no no one size fits all to this, by the way. The great takeaway from this relentless collection of natural history observations —there are thirty pages of bibliography — is that variety is all.
Just one example: American Kestrels cache food throughout the year. In the non-breeding season, they’ll often store food for later in the day, and sometimes even the next day. Vertebrate prey can obviously hold up longer in the cold. Our breeding pair seemed to store food overnight. I’ve seen no winter caching myself. Research suggests that the birds will eat before the long cold night.
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And this just in: colorful bird eggs, not something seen in reptiles, are another inheritance from dinosaurs.