Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds

So there was this post going around on Tumblr which started out by talking about how chickens eat meat and cannibalise each other, which soon led to other folks commenting that chickens are dinosaurs, which soon led to yet other folk confirming this to be scientific fact - that, yes, not all dinosaurs went extinct, because BIRDS are, technically speaking, DINOSAURS.

Now, I've known that this was the case for a while, but the book that blew my mind regarding this fact was published in 2009 (How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner and James Gorman), so I'm not really updated on the science as it stands now. So I did some poking around and found this book, which was published in 2014 and, therefore, is comfortably recent enough for my tastes.

And it certainly delivers on the new discoveries, talking as it does about the cache of feathered dinosaurs being found in China, which prove that birds are dinosaurs, and that maybe feathers were far more common amongst dinosaurs than we ever imagined. It also tackles issues related to palaeontology, like how smuggling and faking fossils is very much an issue, and the ever-perennial problem of how the fossil record still has huge gaps in it that haven't been filled - at least, not YET. It also tackles the potential future for studying dinosaurs - up to and including the chance that we may someday reverse-engineer a chicken into a wee little dinosaur. I find this particularly pertinent because I am holding out hope that one day, some day, I'll have a pair of turkey-sized velociraptors on the ends of leashes as I walk about Manila. They will be cute, they will be smart, they will be fluffy, and they will be DANGEROUS.

All in all, this is a really fun and informative read. If you didn't know that birds are dinosaurs, this explains why; if you already knew that but are looking for something that'll summarise the latest research, this'll do just that.