Did you know that dinosaurs are alive today? They're just called birds.
“All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds," Field Museum’s dinosaur curator Jingmai O’Connor said. “Birds are basically one group of dinosaurs, and if you look at the dinosaurs that are closely related to them, you’ll see that they are very similar to birds.”
O’Connor recently published “When Dinosaurs Conquered the Skies,” a children’s book about the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. It’s written for children ages 8 to 12. She also signed books in the museums’ Science Hub and showed some behind-the-scenes work.
Mayra Zurita and her husband Rogelio are visitors from Kansas who bought a book to take back to their nephews.
“And then to find out where we live, you can find fossils," Zurita said. “Now, it makes us want to go back and start digging.”
O’Connor was inspired to become a paleontologist thanks to one of her college professors. She said a lot of scientists who end up in the field were encouraged to do so by a passionate teacher.
“You can really only love what you know, right?" O'Connor said. "So a good teacher helps you to actually really know something to really understand something.”
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She hopes her new book gets kids excited about science.
“I hope that they see birds in a different way, like, 'Wow, these are dinosaurs.'"
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