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A favorite question is "what happened to the dinosaurs?" The fact that these incredible beasts that ruled the world for so long are extinct is one of the most fascinating and thought provoking aspect of our earth's prehistory. Recent scientific discoveries have suggested a new answer to this old question - dinosaurs are not extinct. Birds are actually dinosaurs!

The arguments behind this statement revolve around what makes a bird a bird, a mammal a mammal, a reptile a reptile, and a dinosaur a dinosaur. The earliest of these groups to appear, the reptiles, have scales, lay eggs (or hatch them internally), and are cold-blooded. Mammals have hair, give birth to their young (except the Monotremes, which lay eggs), produce milk to feed their young, and are warm-blooded. Birds have feathers (and scales on the legs), lay eggs, and are warm-blooded. It used to be thought that dinosaurs were closely related to reptiles - that they had scales, laid eggs, and were cold-blooded.

New fossil evidence, however, indicates that dinosaurs (particularly the therapod dinosaurs, including velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex) had feathers and scales, laid eggs, and were warm-blooded. This is almost identical to the birds. Since birds evolved from therapod dinosaurs, rather than calling dinosaurs birds, it is more logical to call birds dinosaurs!

Maybe if you really want to go "dinosaur watching" in the Hartman Prehistoric Garden, bring your binoculars, and here is what you might find:

YR - year-round resident
S - summer resident
W - winter resident
M - migrant only
B - has been known to breed at ZBG

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