Shedding Light On The Dinosaur-Bird Connection Summary

What is the evidence that dinosaurs are still among us? A text written by the American Museum of Natural History called "Shedding Light on the Dinosaur-Bird Connection" is an attempt to convey and display skeletal, behavioral, and brain connections as evidence that birds are living dinosaurs. Initially "Shedding Light on the Dinosaur-Bird Connection" brings claims of skeletal evidence being proof that birds are living dinosaurs. An initial piece of evidence comes from a simple connection in the bone. Stating, "[m]any similarities can be found when comparing a skeleton of a living bird to the fossilized skeleton of a non-bird theropod, like Sinornithosaurus. They both have a hole in the hipbone, a feature that distinguishes most dinosaurs from all other animals," shows an attempt from the author to prove that a simple hole in a hip bone distinguishes them and serves as an aid to prove a …show more content…
Throughout this section, the text does stay on topic and does not leave any flaw in the claim. Later, the text also makes a claim there is brain evidence to prove that birds are living dinosaurs. The last piece of evidence for the claim that birds are living dinosaurs in "Shedding Light on the Dinosaur-Bird Connection" is brain evidence. First, there is technology that allows us to peer into the brain of non-bird ancestors and evaluate their brains, which have shown that "[t]hey found that this region was very large in non-bird dinosaurs closely related to birds. Dr. Balanoff’s research suggests that these dinosaurs developed big brains long before flight, laying the cerebral foundation that made the eventual development of powered flight possible," which demonstrates how researchers have possibly found when and how birds evolved from their ancestors and began to take