November 22, 2025
Happy Thanksgiving! Want some gravy with that dinosaur?
Working at NOVA has taught me a few fun things about the classic Thanksgiving dinner, but here’s my favorite: The centerpiece of the table, which cooks all over the U.S. agonize over, trying to get it to that perfect tasty spot between raw and dry as dust – the turkey – is actually a dinosaur.
For much of my life, I thought that dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago, after an asteroid the size of Mount Everest slammed into Earth, first frying the atmosphere, then plunging the whole planet into a dark, cold winter and wiping out about 75% of all species, including pretty much everything at the top of the food chain. But thanks to NOVA, I finally learned that along with some scrappy little mammals, one type of scrappy little dinosaur survived the mayhem, not only avoiding extinction, but going on to diversify even more than mammals. Those scrappy dinos were birds.
That’s right, birds are dinosaurs, specifically, a branch of a group of dinosaurs called theropods, which mostly walk on two legs and three forward-facing toes on each foot, and have hollow bones. Birds are the only theropod branch that survived the mass extinction after the asteroid, but before that disaster, theropods included probably the most famous dinosaur of all: Tyrannosaurus rex. T. rex might have been sitting pretty at the top of the food chain during the Late Cretaceous, but when the asteroid hit and the weather around the planet got very, very bad, T. rex was not scrappy.
Some scientists started suspecting that birds were related to dinosaurs back in the 19th century, with the discovery of a feathered fossil called Archaeopteryx which seemed part-bird / part-reptile. And over the next hundred years, more and more feathered dinosaur fossils started turning up, until the resemblance between dinosaurs and birds was too strong to deny. In 2020, scientists reported the discovery of a fossil called Asteriornis (though I much prefer its nickname, “Wonderchicken”). Wonderchicken lived less than a million years before the asteroid hit, and was clearly a modern bird. It also was relatively small, probably spent most of its time on the ground, and wasn’t fussy about food. In other words, scrappy!
So, if you’re having a bird this Thursday, you can be thankful for those little dinos who survived that big asteroid. And if you’d like to learn much more about the evolution of your main course, check out NOVA’s Dino Birds.
Wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at NOVA –