Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/15/the-shoebill-stork-acts-like-a-dinosaur.html
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Well…they certainly are prehistoric. Birds have been around longer than humans. It’s also unquestioned by all but creationists that their line of evolution includes dinosaurs. The only question is whether birds are dinosaurs, and I think most scientists today would say that they are. But it’s a semantic discussion, really. There is no doubt they evolved from other dinosaurs, and no doubt that all other evolutionary lines of dinosaurs were killed off in a mass extinction event. So if we want to call them dinosaurs, we can. Had any non-avian dinosaurs survived, it might make sense to distinguish between the two, but they didn’t.
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… because we all know how the dinosaurs acted - from the Saturday morning cartoons and the movies, right?
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Cute? I find it creepy-looking.
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Contributed by Popkin!
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Obligatory:
(One of the many things that bothered me about the Pixar movie The Good Dinosaur was when the T-Rex cowboy was talking about the time he dealt with an “outlaw Stego.” Even with the alternate timeline where the meteor didn’t cause mass extinction, and humans lived alongside certain dinosaur species, that made absolutely no sense.)
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I can’t help but feel that modern dinosaurs have skipped too many leg days.
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With one possible exception
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Ahem
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It’s a real shame that the Moa was wiped out by humans so quickly once they arrived in New Zealand. That was only about 600 years ago!
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Emu:
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Obligatory!
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PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING
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This is just slightly off, most of the fossil fuel was produced millions of years before dinosaurs came onto the scene.
That plastic dinosaur is made mostly of very, very old plant matter that could not break down, because it grew at a time that there were no bacteria or fungus suited to decompose it.
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Birds have been around longer than humans, but then so have mammals – both go back to the Jurassic. Modern species of birds have all evolved in the last couple million years, same as modern mammals like us. I think it is worth remembering that no living thing is really less ancient than the others, they just have more or less updated looks. 
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Birds are dinosaurs. Full stop.
Not related to, not descended from - they are the dinosaurs that survived the asteroid strike. It’s not in debate among evolutionary biologists. Check out the first paragraph of Wikipedia on “Dinosaur”
That’s why sometimes you’ll hear “non-avian dinosaurs,” because the avian dinosaurs are birds.
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Have you seen vids of Secretary birds stomping snakes to death for dinner? Legs seem pretty good on them!
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