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?

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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

14 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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!

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The mighty Chicken is the closest living relative to the lowly Tyrannosaurus Rex, believe it or not

Anonymous 0 Comments

>Why aren’t Bats, Snakes, Apes ,Turtles

Because they’re not descended from dinosaurs and birds are.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because chickens and birds are actually directly descended from dinosaurs while mammals are descended from rat like things that lived alongside dinosaurs, and other reptiles are cousins of dinosaurs

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Easy. You can only use chicken meat to make dinosaur-shaped nuggets. Hence, dinosaur descendants.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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