Birds are dinosaurs. This is one of those facts that you are sure is true but are not entirely sure why. The problem is this: the theory of evolution is deceptively simple. Like all great scientific theories, its genius is hidden beneath a superficial layer of accessibility (perhaps none more so than evolution), and to understand it fully requires careful extrication by a talented and experienced guide.
Steve Brusatte, a professor of palaeontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, is abler than most to construct a readable narrative out of a seemingly insurmountable agglomeration of facts. Take his The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018): 250mn years and hundreds of thousands of characters condensed into one volume of some 400 pages. In his new book The Story of Birds, he repeats the trick, and manages to “organize and focus 150 million years of evolution into a coherent story”.
Of course, it helps that dinosaurs are endlessly fascinating. Put the facts in any order and people will read them. You may ask whether we need to know about the dinosaurian ancestry of birds to appreciate them. But this is no shameless exploitation of our fascination with monsters and mystery. Why? First, because the fact that “the leg of a barnyard chicken is a miniature version of any T. rex leg you see in a museum” is nothing less than incredible. Second, advances in the field of genetics mean that scientific speculation about the fossil record is becoming less hedged, thus enriching the present research, as this book shows.