Birds are dinosaurs. Here's how scientists know

When you picture a dinosaur, what does it look like? For Jingmai O'Connor, paleobiologist and associate curator of reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago, the dinosaurs she studies look a lot more like birds.

"If you looked at an artist's reconstruction of something like Velociraptor or Microraptor ... you would see that it pretty much looks the same as a bird," Jingmai says. "In terms of the plumage, the soft tissues covering the body, it would have looked very, very birdlike."

In this episode, Short Wave delves into the dinosaur-avian connection. Which dinosaurs had feathers? Were they using them to fly? And once and for all – what are those ancient dinosaurs' relationship to birds today?

Have other dinosaur questions you want us to unravel? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!

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