Are Dinosaurs Birds, or Are Birds Dinosaurs?
When you see a bird, what comes to mind immediately. Is it just a bird or something else. When I see birds, what comes to mind is dinosaurs and while you are trying to kill the urge to reply me and tell me how wrong I am because you want to finish reading the post, let me quickly tell you that if you go through the ancestral histories of birds, then you must have seen that dinosaurs are ancestors of birds.
On the tree of life, every living animal with four limbs, spine in the back, belly in the front, and a head on top are known as Tetrapod. From our common ancestor, amphibians broke out, followed by mammals, then reptiles and Archosaurs which includes animals such as Pterosaurs, Crocodiles, and Dinosaurs. When you now check the Dinosaurs tree, this is where birds come in.
If what we see about dinosaurs are bones without being able to identify the fleshes that cover them, then we might be able to see a similarity between birds and dinosaurs.
From the bone arrangement of dinosaurs, we could tell that their weight caused them to be front heavy since they had big forelimbs and the once that lost their tails toppled over to form a crouching posture which is still present in big birds like ostriches and small birds like sparrows.
Looking at the skeleton of Archaeopteryx we can be able to tell the history of the transition between dinosaurs that were scaly like the Deinonychus and our common bird Gallus gallus domesticus or chicken. The Archaeopteryx shared similarities with birds including its forelimbs being enlarged looking like wings, and its pubic bone being pointed towards the tail just like that of your house bird chickens. They also had clavicles just like the turkey you eat on festive celebration (those wish bones).
Dinosaurs also looked like reptiles as they had long tails, claws on their fingers and rib on their belly and chest. Compared to birds, they had teeth because I cannot imagine how disastrous that would be seeing that your house chicken or parrot have teeth or those banana eating Ostriches have teeth.
Birds are Tetrachromats, having four color receptors and can see color plumage in the ultraviolet range and since we have seen evidences that some dinosaurs had feathers, it is possible that they also had tetrachromat vision. When it comes to sound, we cannot specifically say that we have the sound of the dinosaurs but birds create their symphonies from the syrinx but dinosaurs lack this adaptation skill.
When Asteriod hit earth some 66 million years ago only about 20% of earths animal species survived. While the big dinosaurs were not able to, the smaller ones with wings were able to survive as well as feed on small food to sustain them, and they flied. Some of the birds we see today might have been dinosaurs that evolved with birds like Sinornis santensis being one of the first birds to have flew. Other early birds that must have evolved are Vegavis Iaai, a 67 million year old bird which has a Syrinx and might have sounded like a duck.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature
https://www.nwf.org/news-and-magazines/national-wildlife
https://whatsinjohnsfreezer.com/2013/04/24/3d_dinosaurs/
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/flight/aves.html
http://www.audubon.org/magazine/january-february-2015
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