Modern Dinosaurs

I'm speaking about the descendants of the theropods. Crocodiles, alligators, caymans, and the great Kimodo dragons are more like sharks and the great turtles: they aren't existing dinosaurs, they're lizards (and sharks) that haven't changed drastically since the time of dinosaurs. They're very similar to what they were when dinosaurs roamed, and have survived because of their highly successful design and ecosystem niche.

While dinosaurs were the dominant reptilian force during their height, after the extinction event of 65 MYA, only a select few survived; the specialized descendants of the theropods.

The theropods came in all sizes, but the largest and most famous would have to be every kids fantasy horse, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The name says it all: King of the Terrible Lizards. With something that has a little less menacing a presence, I give you:



So, depending on how much attention might have been paid towards the scientific community on the study of things dinosaur, one might have heard of the general consensus that all of our fine feathered friends are the remnants of the dinosaurs, that they are the last vestiges of the Land Before Time, the link to T-Rex, and here we mean literally.

If the idea that birds coming from dinosaurs seems hard to swallow, imagine that at the time of the 65 MYA extinction event, the event that augured in the dawn of the Age of the Mammals, the only mammals were bug eating and berry foraging rodent like critters. Doesn't seem as weird to me as typing on a plastic rectangle some symbols that I and my peers understand as abstract or concrete concepts.

In any case, by any measure the modern dinosaurs have been wildly successful on this planet. They have colonized every continent and adapted means to survive in each of the worlds varied environments. This ability to adapt has brought the class Aves to a bulging taxonomic section with more entries than the largest mammalian class, Rodentia.

There are too many cool things about birds for me to go into too much detail here, but there are two groups I want to mention quickly. The first are the Corvids. The corvids are the largest, toughest, and smartest of the Passerines, one of the largest sub-orders in Aves. In fact, some corvids are considered to be some of the smartest animals--period--on the planet. Their brain to body-mass ratio is similar to dolphins and chimpanzees, and they have been known to recognize themselves in reflections as well as been seen fashioning tools. The Passerines are known as "perching birds" more recently, and used to be called (somewhat inaccurately) "songbirds".

The corvids are the crows, ravens, magpies, jays and jackdaws.

I ended up learning about the corvids because I was curious why crows weren't listed as birds of prey. Turns out that many birds aren't listed as "birds of prey" that gather most of their food from hunting, like cranes, storks, penguins, and gulls. Gulls are tough sumbitches, tough but also lazy, and scavenge human developments more than hunting nowadays.

Technical "birds of prey", or, as I like to call, "rightful heirs to real estate in the sentence '______ descended from T-Rex'", come from one of two groups: raptors and owls.

Makes sense, right? One group are daytime hunters, the other nocturnal.

It seemed like the criteria is for surprise attack from the air coupled with sharp and powerful talons and beak. Sounds like raptors and owls to me.

Modern dinosaurs for sure.

Owls are broken up into two groups, neither of which has a cool sounding name. Don't get me wrong--I dig owls like crazy. It's kinda hard to get pumped between "barn owls" and "typical owls".

Here's a Storm-trooper looking barn-owl:



Raptors as well have two general groups, the falcons and the entries from the larger group Accipitridae. The differences between the falcons and the others are subtle, but have to do with wing shape and size limits. The entries from the Acc. are the eagles, kites, buzzards, and vultures, among other similar species. Kestrels are falcons, if anyone's curious.

Here's a falcon:



One thing I found weird was that in England what are called "buzzards" are called "hawks" in America, and that it seems like we almost interchangeably use "buzzard" and "vulture" here in the States. Hawks aren't a special group, the name tends to be used for kites in certain areas, kestrels in others, small eagles in other places. The closest thing it seemed like people could agree on being solely a "hawk" was the Osprey, the fish-nabber.

The biggest bird of prey, the one closest to the heir of the T-Rex descendant title, would be a specific type of eagle, possibly the most badass of all wild animals, the wolf hunting, grizzly menacing, badger robbing golden eagle.



I've got an entire post about them coming up. They were the reason I ended up learning so much about birds, our Modern Dinosaurs. I even left out much stuff I wanted to write about, like whoopers and albatrosses.

The king, or queen as it turns out (by sexual dimorphism), by a sizable margin is the Golden Eagle.