Chickens are constantly called living dinosaurs. Why aren’t Bats, Snakes, Apes ,Turtles…mostly all animals called living dinosaurs if there were versions of that same animal walking the earth millions of years ago?
In: Biology
It’s not that there were chickens walking alongside dinosaurs, it’s that modern birds (including chickens) are *literally* the descendants of dinosaurs. The extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous Period killed *most* of the species of dinosaurs that lived at the time, but the surviving species of that extinction event were what are called the “avian” or bird-like dinosaurs. Those surviving dinosaurs evolved over the past 65 million years into all of the bird species that we have today.
You take something like apes on the other hand (including humans!) and, sure, we had ancestors at the time of the dinosaurs – early mammals who survived the extinction event and evolved over millions of years into modern apes and humans, alongside other mammalian species. But if you trace the family tree of chickens back, their ancestors 66 million years ago didn’t just live alongside dinosaurs, they were *actual* dinosaurs!
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