The other day I was watching a robin on the lawn. It was continually sprinting and stopping, cocking its head and then seizing a worm in a lightning-fast strike.

Normally, I would have thought little of this, but a new book by paleontologist Steve Brusatte has changed how I look at birds. I wasn’t just observing an everyday songbird but a true, surviving dinosaur.

“The Story of Birds: A New History from their Dinosaur Origins to the Present” is an epic tale of evolution that explains in fascinating detail how birds are part of the dinosaur family tree, and how they came to be the more than 10,000 species alive today.

In the process, Brusatte brings the world of millions of years ago into the present, linking the age of dinosaurs to the birds outside our windows.

In lively, accessible prose with lots of repetition of key facts, Brusatte draws on everything from fossils and genetics to embryology and modern bird behaviour to make his case.

It’s a story of extinction, resilience, adaptation and evolution always finding a way forward.

Saying that birds ARE dinosaurs is not some clever use of language or a way of stating that birds descended from dinosaurs in some vague sense. They are as much dinosaurs as bats are mammals and dragonflies are insects.

To be more precise, birds are the only living dinosaurs and belong within the theropod branch of the dinosaur family tree — the group that also included Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex.

The prehistoric theropods were a large group of mostly bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs with three-toed feet, a horizontal posture and, in many cases, bones containing air spaces connected to the respiratory system — just like birds today.

After the opening “Birds are dinosaurs” chapter, Brusatte visits themes like the evolution of feathers and wings, flight (including the fascinating story of Archaeopteryx), beaks, and how birds survived the asteroid of 66 million years ago.

He then goes on to discuss the explosion of bird........

© Peterborough Examiner