Birds and Juvenile Dinosaurs

EXTRA LEARNING: Great job again on the presentations today, especially the Reptiles group who got the audience so engaged that they kept asking questions! Also great job to Scott for presenting the multiple views about the relationship between birds and dinosaurs. Scientists are indeed still debating about this particular relationship. Some think that birds evolved directly from one lineage of dinosaurs. Others think that birds and dinosaurs shared a common ancestor. Here is another more recent hypothesis published in Scientific American (based on a paper in the science journal Nature) proposing that birds were originally juvenile dinosaurs: "Did Retained Juvenile Traits Help Birds Outlive Dinosaurs?" The debate goes on as scientists discover new fossils and new lines of evidence.