Chickens Are My Favorite Dinosaurs

I've been listening to an audiobook, A Grown-up Guide to Dinosaurs, and it's quite delightful. It appeals to my logical mind, a throw back to my years as a practicing scientist, and I'm learning a lot about things that I didn't understand before.

One of my favorite lines so far is from a series of build-up statements. The book starts by asking children to name their favorite dinosaur, and the variety of answers is impressive. Then as the book continues, the author asks each interviewed scientist to name his or her favorite dinosaur. The answers remain varied, and the reasons given, by children and adults, are soundly logical and sweetly entertaining.

And then we get to the guy who states that his favorite dinosaur is a chicken. It's the launch pad to the presentation of all we've learned (I use the non-royal we here, denoting all of the paleologists around the world, with absolutely no help from me, who have unraveled the jigsaw puzzle, a pleasing mixture of metaphors) that link the world of birds with the world of dinosaurs.

I am not surprised by this revelation.

Farm tour, complete with dinosaurs

When Dambara and I lived on the Llamas and Niyamas Farm outside of Gaston, OR, we had a small flock of chickens. The chickens were a delightful component to the farm, as they wandered around in small bunches, visiting their favorite scratching spots or coming over to see what we were up to. Their little bodies are feathery half-moons that tip forward to peck, then backward to trot, then forward to peck, little pitchers of delight, pouring their cheer onto every nook and cranny of the farm.

They also had a choir. In the morning, the full choir would gather in the stable to take turns in the nesting boxes, waiting for their turn, sometimes impatiently, because out of four nesting boxes, there was one favorite box that everyone preferred to use, and those broody slow pokes could drive the wanna-be-in-that-box-ers to operatic crescendos.

The choir had some notable soloists as well. Most of the ladies were murmurers, chuckling and clucking softly amongst themselves, telling stories and jokes as they sauntered around, but occasionally a soloist would hold forth from somewhere out on the hillside pasture. There was the jungle lady, who parroted and macawed her way through the morning and even into the afternoon.  And then there was the Pterodactyl.

One might wonder how one would recognize the call of a Pterodactyl, recording equipment being rare in the jurassic period. But when that chicken sang out across the valley, it conjured visions of T. rexes salivating, or the odd Stegosaurus lumbering along, brushing aside giant ferns and conifers, and a Pterodactyl (which is actually not a dinosaur, which did surprise me) gliding overhead, its pointy head swiveling this way and that, singing its morning song.

The single artifact that brought the world's paleologists to the surprising connection between birds and dinosaurs was, quite simply, feathers. Feathers don't preserve easily over the eons, so they are a rare find. But found they are, and you can hear all about it in A Grown-up Guide to Dinosaurs, which, I fear, may be an audible.com original, available only there. But it is a delightful listen, and you might learn a lot of thought-provoking ideas.

And your favorite dinosaur might turn out to be a chicken.