How did bird dinosaurs survive the meteor?

At But Why, we believe that curiosity is key to learning. That's why we bring kids' questions to life with experts, fun stories, and fascinating facts in our podcast and video episodes. But we can't do this without you. Support from people who love the show and believe in what we do helps keep curiosity thriving. Head to butwhykids.org slash donate to become a But Why fan club member or to make a gift in any amount to support the show. Thanks. And stay curious. This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. We've gotten thousands of questions, and hundreds of them are about dinosaurs. We took a really cool field trip to Texas a few years ago to look at some newly uncovered dinosaur footprints in a dry riverbed, and to make an episode all about these prehistoric beasts. But that only scratched the surface of all the questions we've gotten about dinosaurs. So today we're going to tackle a chunk more of them, and we're going to be doing it with a paleontologist. My name is Dr. Emily Bamforth. I am a paleontologist and the curator of the Philip J. Curry Dinosaur Museum. So paleontology is actually a pretty broad field. There are paleontologists that just study dinosaurs, but paleontology is actually the study of fossils. So anything that fossilizes gets studied by paleontologists. So whether that's bugs or plants or fish or even bacteria, anything that was alive and is now dead and fossilized, that's what paleontologists study. Emily Bamforth does study dinosaurs and all the things that lived with them from her home base in Alberta, Canada. That includes going out and finding them, digging them up, bringing them back to the museum, preparing them and taking care of those collections once they're in the museum. And then telling the world about all the stuff we found. Emily fell in love with dinosaurs when she was just four years old and saw her first dinosaur exhibit. So if you're a dino-loving kid, you should know there's a field of study for you as you grow older. Dinosaurs first appeared on Earth about 245 million years ago, give or take a few million years. Then they lived for a long, long time. But not all dinosaurs lived at the same time as each other. Just as there are animals that have gone extinct more recently, there were dinosaurs that went extinct or evolved over time. And it's also important to remember that not all of the animals living back then were dinosaurs. Yeah, that's right. And there are some animals that are actually called dinosaurs that are not. So the plesiosaurs that lived in the ocean and the big mosasaurs, kind of other marine reptiles, they sometimes get called dinosaurs, but they weren't. They belong to a different group of reptiles, but because they lived at the same time as dinosaurs, they sometimes are accidentally called dinosaurs. It's the same with things like the pterosaurs, things like pterodactyls and pterodon. Those things are actually not dinosaurs either. They belong to a different group of reptiles, but again, they lived at the same time as dinosaurs, so they sometimes get lumped in there. But dinosaurs are actually a very specific group of reptiles, but of course, they weren't the only ones living at the time. There's a whole bunch of other things that were around as well. There were crocodiles, horseshoe crabs, mammals, plants, and insects living in the time of the dinosaurs. But let's back up a second and consider this question from Willow. I'm five years old. I live in New York City. Why dinosaurs ancestors and what are dinosaurs ancestors ancestors? Based on what we know from the fossil record, we think that dinosaurs and crocodiles had the same ancestor. so the ancestor of dinosaurs probably looked like a crocodile maybe like a little bit of a skinny crocodile that maybe could have gotten up and walked on two legs so some of our very early early dinosaurs back when dinosaurs first appear they look a little like crocodiles but crocodiles that walked on two legs and so before that we know that dinosaurs are reptiles so they came from the basically the same group of animals that are lizards and snakes and crocodiles and turtles came from today. So basically from a reptilian ancestor, we got like a crocodilian-like ancestor and from those crocodile-like things, we got the dinosaurs and then the birds. So that kind of answers Amos's question. I live in Massachusetts. I'm six years old. Are there any dinosaurs that are mammals? Dinosaurs are reptiles and mammals are mammals. They're actually different types of animals. There were mammals around at the same time as dinosaurs. And so sometimes it's easy to forget. But there's actually a lot of mammals that lived at the same time as dinosaurs. Mammals just didn't really kind of get big until after the dinosaurs went extinct. But they were certainly there. Mammals actually predate dinosaurs. Hi, my name's Olive. I live in Melbourne, Australia. I'm seven years old. If crocodiles are dinosaurs, why are they not extinct? The closest ancestor or the closest relative of a modern bird is actually a crocodile. And so dinosaurs and crocodiles were reasonably closely related. But crocodiles today, just as the dinosaurs and the birds kind of went off on their own branch, modern crocodiles went off on their own branch too. And so even though crocodiles are really ancient animals, they've also been around for a long time, they've also kind of evolved on their own branch. And so crocodiles, again, they've been around for a long time, but it's not the same crocodiles that live today as the ones that lived in the fossil record. They have changed and evolved the same way that dinosaurs have. So crocodiles and birds are actually more closely related to each other than crocodiles and lizards, right? That's right, yeah. So crocodiles and dinosaurs and birds belong to a group called the archosaurs. They basically have their own group all to themselves. And then our lizards and our turtles and our snakes are on another branch of the reptile tree. When you think about evolution, remember, we're talking millions of years. So animals can share ancestors and not look anything alike now. You might have been surprised to hear that dinosaurs and birds and crocodiles are all related. More on that in just a minute. But if you know anything about dinosaurs, you've probably heard that they went extinct about 66 million years ago. Hi, my name is Maya from Monterey, California. Why are dinosaurs extinct? My name's Jaga. Why did dinosaurs live 16 million years ago and not now? My name is Kinley. I am seven years old and I live in Clive, Iowa. Why were dinosaurs extinct? My name is Beatrix. I five years old I live in Ohio Why are dinosaurs extinct including my favorite one the brachiosaurus I Sebastian and I five years old Why did the dinosaurs go extinct Hello, I'm Evie. I'm five years old. I live in Kansas. And my question is, like, why did the dinosaurs and other reptiles that just didn't survive the media when alligators and cockroaches just did? My name's Noah, and I'm five years old, and I'm from Mobile, Kentucky. When were the dinosaurs extinct? Hello, my name is Amelia. I am 6 years old and I am from Washington, D.C. and I want to know how did the asteroid make the dinosaurs go extinct? My name is Lucas. I live in Germany and I am 7 years old. My question is, how do trees come back after the dinosaurs were extinct? Hi, my nickname is Ava. I'm eight years old, and I live in Florida. And my question is, why did the asteroid make the dinosaurs extinct, but it didn't cover the whole Earth? My name is Hannah. I live in San Diego, California, and I'm four years old. And my question is, why do dinosaurs don't live so much? So the dinosaur mass extinction has been a huge debate for a really long time. And I remember when I was a kid, it was still very much a question about what killed the dinosaurs. And there's been a lot of work that's been done pretty much since the 1980s. 1880s, and now we've pretty well established that the big thing that caused that extinction was a meteorite impact, or what geologists would call a bolide impact. Basically, a giant piece of space rock came and hit the Earth, probably around the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and basically caused a whole bunch of bad things to happen all at once. So like forest fires, and acid rain, and earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and it would have been a very bad day on planet Earth. So we think that that event probably almost instantly wiped out the big dinosaurs, at least in North America. And after that happened, their ecosystems, so kind of all of the, you know, the things that were happening around them also collapsed. And so we know from the mass extinction that nothing big survived. So nothing bigger than basically like a golden retriever dog survived. So all the big things went extinct. They just didn't have the food. They didn't have the resources. They didn't have the habitats they needed anymore. And then there probably would have been what we call a nuclear winter. So all of that ash and the ejecta from that big meteorite impact would have blocked out the sun. So that would have affected the plant communities. And so the animals that relied on those plants would have died as well. That certainly sounds terrible. When we think about this time period, it's often called a mass extinction event when lots and lots of animals and plants died. But it's important to remember that a lot of plants, animals, and insects also survived. So we think the things that survived the mass extinction were small. They were able to eat a whole bunch of different things. So they were what we call generalists. So they could eat seeds and they could eat plants and they could maybe eat detritus and they could eat insects. So they were able, they didn't starve because they could eat a bunch of different things. and then animals that had some kind of way to escape the after effects. So if they lived in water or if they lived underground, they tended to do pretty well. So for example, turtles did really well out of the mass extinction. Most turtles survived the mass extinction because most turtles live in water. So they were able to go into the water and hide. The early birds, so there were birds around at the time of the extinction. And we think the ones that survived were the ones that were able to eat seeds. So seeds are something that doesn't necessarily rely on the sun. So seeds can hang out on the surface for a long time. So birds that were able to eat seeds did pretty well. And then there were some animals that were just lucky. So I think in terms of what survives a mass extinction, whether it's the dinosaur mass extinction or one of the four mass extinctions before that, it just seems that there were some animals that just got lucky and they managed to survive and they became really, really diverse afterwards. And what else survived the mass extinction that killed off so many of the dinosaurs that we can point to as ancestors of modern animals today? Yeah. So the crocodiles survived the mass extinction. So crocodiles actually were around even in places like Canada for a long time after the dinosaur mass extinction. And of course, the mammals. So the mammals at the time, there were some slightly bigger ones, but most mammals were really small. So they were able to go underground or live in trees. They could survive the effects of that meteorite impact. And they obviously become really, really abundant and fill all kinds of niches. Mammals get really, really big after the extinction. So mammals are basically one of the great survivors. And birds, of course. And of course, are, you know, these living, we call them living fossils. So things like sharks. Sharks are still with us today. Sharks have been around pretty much forever. Some of the groups of fish that live in the oceans, some of the amphibians, the salamanders, the frogs survived the mass extinction as well. So basically, everything we see today in our world survived the mass extinction. You mentioned that some of the animals that could survive that mass extinction and the effects of the meteorite were animals that could hide or get away or had specific foods that they ate that they could still eat. And Grayson would love a little more explanation. I am seven and I live in Flagstaff, Arizona. How did some bird dinosaurs survive the meteor? Yeah, so at the time of the dinosaurs, there were what we would consider true birds. They looked a little different than birds today. They had teeth, for example, and they had bony tails like dinosaurs did. But otherwise, they probably would have looked a lot like birds. So, of course, they were small, the ones that survived. So the small bodied ones, the smaller you are, the better your chances of surviving a mass extinction. So most of those birds were small. And they could also, we think, eat a whole bunch of different things. So birds can eat seeds. They can eat insects. There's some, not many, but there's some herbivorous birds as well. They could eat fish. Some birds today, like vultures, eat carrion, eat things that are already dead. So those birds that survived probably had a range of diets that they could eat. And birds can also fly. So they could actually get out of those areas. If it was really bad where they were living, they could fly away and find a better place. And that was definitely something that, you know, something like a triceratops would not be able to do. So we think those are probably the reasons why the birds survived. Birds, of course, were also warm-blooded. So even though it got really you know really cold they could probably find a way to warm up So lots of adaptations that meant that a lot of those groups of birds survived So there were already birds living in the time of the dinosaurs. But if you've been following dinosaur news over the course of your lifetime, you already know that birds are dinosaurs. Stay tuned. We'll explain. This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm, and today we're talking dinos with Canadian paleontologist Dr. Emily Bamforth. We were just talking about a mass extinction event about 66 million years ago that wiped out tons of animals, including most of the dinosaurs. But there are animals walking, well, flying among us today that are essentially living dinosaurs. Let's get into it. Hi, my name is Alice. I live in Columbia, Maryland and I'm eight. How are birds and dinosaurs related? Yeah so really good question and this is something that paleontologists have really only just figured out in the last kind of 20 or 30 years and now if you look at a bird it's sort of easy to see a dinosaur. Like if you look at a bird's foot, birds have got scaly feet like dinosaurs like other reptiles and they have claws like like dinosaurs would have as well. So we now know that a lot of dinosaurs also had feathers. And so we actually know that now, not only we know that they're related, birds are actually dinosaurs. Birds are the dinosaurs that didn't go extinct in that mass extinction. And there's a whole lot of different lines of evidence, ways that we can tell that by looking at the fossil record. But dinosaurs are actually still among us in the form of birds. And that is kind of mind-blowing. And that totally changed how paleontologists looked at dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs. Yeah, so that's kind of the way that not only paleontologists, but biologists kind of think about life. And so, for example, humans are mammals. And we're not the only mammals. There's a whole lot of mammals out there. And the thing that makes us mammals is we have a series of shared characteristics, basically, like we have hair and we give birth to live young and we feed the young with milk. That's what kind of thing that makes mammals mammals but we all have the same ancestor like we all have the same like great great great great great great mammal grandparent and because we all came from that grandparent that makes us all mammals and i was the same with dinosaurs so like dinosaurs are kind of the great great great great great grandparents of birds and so because they're related they have kind of that connection through their their ancestry that's what makes them into into dinosaurs so that they're related through all of that geologic time, and they also have all of those same characteristics. So birds and dinosaurs share a lot of things that are the same. Remember, most of the dinosaurs that ever existed went extinct. So not all dinosaurs evolved into birds. You could kind of say it like this. All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs became birds. The dinosaurs that are closely related to birds, most closely related, are what we call theropods. And those are basically bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs. Bipedal meaning walks on two feet and carnivorous eats meat. That's right. So walked on two legs and ate meat. So those dinosaurs like Velociraptor or Dromaeosaurus, even things like T. rex, Albertosaurus, basically that group of dinosaurs are closely related to birds. And things like Triceratops and the duckbill dinosaurs and the Stegosaurs and the Achalosaurs, even though they're dinosaurs, they're less closely related to birds. Okay, so if some dinosaurs evolved into birds, did dinosaurs have feathers? My name is Charlie. I live in Worcester, Massachusetts. I'm eight years old. My question is, how do we know some dinosaurs had feathers? Hello, my name is Hannah Louise. I am 10 years old and I am from South Korea in Daegu. how do people know dinosaurs had feathers? The reason that we know that dinosaurs had feathers is because we have found dinosaur skeletons with the feathers still attached. So the most famous, or the very first one that was found was the Archaeopteryx. So that was found in Germany. And when they found it, this is kind of a great story, when they originally found it, they could see it was a dinosaur skeleton and that it had all these weird kind of features in the rock around it and they actually started to erase them because they didn't know what they were they thought it was just maybe like a weird thing that was happening in the rock and it wasn't until they looked more closely that they realized that these were feathers and that this at the time they called it an ancient bird um we now know that it's basically a feathered dinosaur um and uh so that that happened like early in the 19th century and then it really wasn't until they found feathered birds in China. China's really well known for its feathered dinosaurs. And that's when they first really started to make the link between birds and dinosaurs because they're actually finding dinosaurs with feathers. And when was that? I mean, you were saying this is only in the last couple of decades because when I was a kid, which was a long time ago, but not as long as the dinosaurs were alive ago, we didn't talk about it that same way. Right. And it's actually something that's happened in my lifetime as well. So here I was this like dinosaur crazy kid. And I remember I was maybe around 10 years old when the first the story of the feathered dinosaurs from China really started to kind of hit the press and you start to see it in books and magazines. And it was really, really exciting. So that was actually in the 1990s. So it's, well, I mean, for me, fairly recent. But again, it's something we've really started to figure out in the last 20 or 30 years or so. Scientists had had theories for a while that dinosaurs and birds were related, but in the 1990s, thousands of feathered dinosaur fossils were found. These bird-like dinosaurs lived alongside those other dinosaurs for a million years. When the asteroid hit Earth, these avian dinosaurs survived. And that might explain a lot about dinosaurs and eggs. Hi, my name's Davis. I'm three and a half years old and live in Belleville, Washington. Why do baby dinosaurs come from eggs? All dinosaurs, as far as we know, laid eggs. Dinosaurs laid eggs basically because their ancestors laid eggs. So dinosaurs, that whole group of animals is kind of related to they had kind of a crocodilian. So an ancestor looked a little bit like a crocodile, and that ancestor laid eggs as well. And so dinosaurs laid eggs because their ancestors laid eggs, and they really had no reason to change from laying eggs. So of course birds today do, because dinosaurs did, because the dinosaur ancestors did. My name is Audrey, and I live in Arlington, Virginia, and I'm five years old. What are dinosaur eggs made out of? Dinosaur eggs are probably made of the same thing that bird eggs are. So basically just made out of calcium or kind of a calcium sort of complex. And so dinosaur eggs, from what we know in the fossil record, probably very similar to bird eggs, except they're probably a little bit thicker because dinosaur eggs, a lot of them are a lot bigger than bird eggs today. Some bird eggs like an ostrich egg are pretty thick right You wouldn necessarily break them by just squeezing it in your hand So maybe kind of like that Yeah so we pretty sure that we know that dinosaur eggs were hard So there are some reptiles that actually have soft eggs, like turtle eggs are soft. But dinosaur eggs were probably hard like a bird egg. And the bigger they were, probably the thicker that eggshell was. Did you hear Emily Bamforth say, we're pretty sure we know that dinosaur eggs were hard? They don't know for certain because eggs aren't preserved very easily. But they're learning things all the time about dinosaurs and what they looked like and how they moved and behaved. There are a lot of things still to learn. We have lots and lots of questions about dinosaurs. And this is why it's great to be a paleontologist. There's no shortage of questions. So one of the big ones that I'm dealing with in my research right now is trying to tell the difference between a male and a female dinosaur. it's really really hard to do because unlike mammals where if you look at a mammal skeleton it's kind of easy to tell a male from a female because the hips are different but dinosaurs laid eggs there's actually very little difference between the hips of male and female dinosaurs and we just don't have enough skulls enough skeletons to really know which which skull is a male skull and which skull is a female skull um so where where i work here we have a big bone bed of an animal called a pachyrhinosaurus and we have a bunch of skulls and even though we've got a bunch of skulls we still can't tell the males from the females and that's something we'd really like to do because that would tell us about how these if we have a herd of dinosaurs like is it males and females and equal are they like elephants where it's like mostly females in the group and and you know they just have one big male with them so these things we don't know So a lot of that behavioral aspect of dinosaurs, we would like to know more about. It's really hard to study it in the fossil record. And of course, we're looking for new dinosaurs. There's between kind of 700 and 1,000 species of dinosaurs known today. But if you think of how many animals species are on the planet today, we know that there's tens of thousands of more dinosaur species that we know nothing about. So we would love to find those as well. So there's still lots and lots of questions. Dinosaur skin is another one, like the color of dinosaurs. We know a little bit about the feathered dinosaurs, what color they were. But things like Triceratops, T. rex, we still don't know very much about colors there either. So there's still lots and lots of questions out there. You're in Alberta, Canada. Is that a hotspot for dinosaurs? Yeah, so Alberta is known for its dinosaur fossils. and it actually has the same kind of the same sort of rocks that are in places like Montana and Wyoming and the Dakotas. And the reason that there are fossils there is basically because of an ancient seaway that used to cut through the middle of North America and dinosaurs used to live on the coast of that seaway. And because that was a good place to live if you were a dinosaur, but it was also a good place to die if you wanted to get fossilized. That's why those areas actually have a lot of dinosaur bones. But there are fossils everywhere, certainly everywhere in North America. You may not find dinosaurs, but you might find things like Ice Age mammals. You might find fossil fish, fossil shells, fossil leaves. So pretty much every area of North America has got fossils of some kind. So you just really kind of have to know what you're looking for. You mentioned the Pachyrhinosaurus. Can you tell us about Big Sam, who is one Pachyrhinosaurus that you have helped dig out? Big Sam is the first skull that has been collected from our bone bed here. It's called the Pipestone Creek bone bed. It was the first skull collected in almost 20 years. And it was really cool to find because it's huge. It's a huge skull for a pachyrhinosaurus. And it's relatively complete. So pretty much the whole head is there. If you were holding it, how big is it? It's about a meter and a half long. And pachyragasaurus have this big, huge, bony bump over their nose called a boss. So the boss is almost a meter wide as well. So this thing is absolutely enormous. So you couldn't pick it up by yourself without worrying about dropping it? Oh, no. It weighs almost 500 pounds. So it was a big job to get it out of the ground. We had to use a shop crane. and then we needed like a hydraulic lift to get it off the ground. And it took us probably the better part of two years to actually get out of the bone bed. And now it's currently in our preparation lab. It'll be probably another 12 months or so before it's ready to be displayed and to be studied. But yeah, certainly one of the coolest things I think I've ever found in the bone bed is this big, big giant skull. What does it feel like when you start to think, oh, I think that's, yes, it is. Oh, my gosh, it is something. Like, what does it feel like in your body? So it is actually like an adrenaline rush. Like, you know, your heart is pounding and you get so, so excited. And I remember when we found Big Sam because the skull was actually flipped upside down. So the roof of the mouth was pointing up. And that's not a way you expect to find a skull. and we uh we found a few little bits and pieces and we thought it was it was just isolated bits of skull that were kind of scattered around um and then I remember towards the end of the season we found the pallet like the roof of the mouth and it was connected to all of these things and we're like this this is actually a real skull like a skull that is put together um and again it is it is an adrenaline rush like you like heart is pounding and it's it's so so exciting and then you step back and you're like, oh, well, now we actually have to get this thing out of the ground without breaking it, which is the next step. Can you imagine being the person like Emily who finds a dinosaur skull and then gets to work on it? And once it's out of the ground, there's still so much studying to be done and research to connect that one animal skull to what's known about this type of dinosaur or to learn something new that's never been realized before. No wonder so many of us are fascinated by dinosaurs and want to be paleontologists when we grow up. There is still so much to discover about the world that existed millions and millions of years before we did. That's it for this episode. Thanks to Dr. Emily Bamforth, museum curator at the Philip J. Curry Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada. As always, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos. Then have them email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. But Why is produced by Sarah Bake, Melody Beaudet, and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX. Our video producer is Joey Palumbo and our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. If you like our show, please have your adults help you give us a thumbs up or a review on whatever podcast platform you use to listen to us. It helps other kids and families find us. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious.