The Littlest Pterodactyl

I suppose it’s awfully hard to believe that this:

Could possibly be related to this:

But according to Sy Montgomery, author of the awesome book “Birdology“, I am living with a tiny dinosaur.

Cooooooooool.

In her book, Sy shares fascinating facts – like how baby tyrannosaurs were covered in down (nevermind that how the scientists figured this out is anyone’s guess) and that many dinosaurs of the three-toed-ferocious-teeth-meat-eating variety also preened their…..feathers.

Fossils found in China now link this:

To this:

And this:

To these:

I had to take Pearl to the vet a couple of years ago because she has a bad wing, and he took x-rays. It still mystifies me that he got her to hold still long enough to do it, and she shrieked loud enough for the building next door to hear, but when the images came back, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

There, in plain view on the x-ray film, was the littlest Pterodactyl I’d ever seen.

I wish I could show you the DVD he gave me, but it’s in some mystery format called “.dll”. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

In the meantime, this is one of my favorite paragraphs in “Birdology”:

In other words: birds are living dinosaurs. To the nimble likes of predatory Velociraptors, birds owe their speed and their smarts. To dinosaurs, they owe their otherwordly appeal – and as well, surely, some of their transcendent mystery and beauty. For this is one of the great miracles of birds, greater, perhaps, than that of flight: when the chickens in my backyard come to my call, or when I look into the sparkling eye of a chickadee, we are communing across a gap of more than 300 million years.

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