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!
Because the other answers did not make this explicit, I want to point out that chickens being descended from dinosaurs also means they *literally are* dinosaurs. Dinosaurs weren’t a thing that ended. They are the group of organisms which share a particular common ancestor, and chickens qualify exactly as much as ankylosaurs or utahraptors.
When people say chickens are dinosaurs, they’re not just being cute, they’re being completely accurate.
If this is at all confusing, it’s the same as how we say humans are apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, eukaryotes, etc. We are all these things. They are just categories at different levels of grouping. Like how Paris is in France and Europe and on Earth all at once.
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