REX According to our leading scientists, I am not yet extinct, and they ought to know. Well, there’s no use crying about it. —Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct Every morning, the dinosaurs make such a racket. I can hear them outside my bedroom window, singing the dawn chorus. When I leave the house they are everywhere. I see them in parks, patrolling the parking lots of shopping malls, on the prairie, along rivers, at the sea, and in New York City, where they live in astonishing numbers. I often find them on my plate at fine and fast-food restaurants. I’m talking about avian dinosaurs, of course, warblers, starlings , catbirds, cowbirds, robins, orioles, gulls, vultures, king-fishers, sandpipers, falcons, pigeons, and chickens, billions of chickens. I’ve been saying for most of the book that the dinosaurs never did go extinct, that birds are dinosaurs, descended from theropod dinosaurs, related to T. rex, and with a great library of dinosaur genes in their genome. This is the consensus of scientists now, but it has not always been so, and since the connection of birds to dinosaurs—both in what we have found so far and in what we hope to find—is at the center of the story I want to tell, it is worth stepping back from the digging and pause, before we dive into laboratory work, to do a little evolutionary bird-watching.
