The Third Lockdown, Day 10: The Dinosaur is Dead.

 No, I speak not of dead princes. The British media is already going full-throttle overboard on this subject, neatly diverting everyone's attention away from the rioting in Northern Ireland, the crashing economy and the oncoming viral tsunami. Two weeks of NI riots and hardly a mention in the British media. The French (et al) media regularly highlight these dire problems and correctly link them directly to Brexit. In the UK... maybe something to do with covid...

But no! I speak of bigger things.

Much bigger!

I'm on about the demise of the 'Terrible Lizards', the dinosaurs. A little light relief in difficult times.

Dinosaurs, as you may well be aware, supposedly went extinct about 66 million years ago. Give or take. It was a Thursday afternoon.

Oh no they didn't...

Let's look at what actually happened. Some, many, even most, experts think that they were wiped out by an asteroid hitting the earth and causing years of disruption to sunlight, food supplies, and Netflix tv.

There are some who doubt this theory. A specialist in this field, no other than Luke, my son v2 has found evidence of human involvement:

Some of us find this to be conclusive proof of Brexit being the cause of the extinction of all dinosaurs.

Whatever the cause, we now know that dinosaurs were not completely wiped out. This fossil (hanging on my wall) proves that dinosaurs did not decease, but indeed live among us.

Archaeopteryx, the definitive proof that dinosaurs are not extinct. 

We call them birds. 

These dinosaurs have not just survived, but they are much more successful than their erstwhile competitor, the mammals.

Number of mammal species = about 6,500.

Number of birds species = about 10,000.

So there. 

In our garden we have a few of these dinosaurs. Sometimes it feels like close to 10,000 of them. So lets take a look at them and try to figure out how they survived the end of all things.

That's a black swan.

All have feathers, all have eyes, all have beaks.

A Carolina. or maybe Darth Vader...

You call that a beak?

I don't remember inviting this one...

Before the Cambrian Explosion, most dinosaurs may well have had feathers, giving them a cuddly appearance not often seen in CGI films of the epoch. They all had eyes. Eyes have evolved many times and could be so important as to spill over into another blog . I am that desperate...

A swan that isn't black!

However, and here's the main point; most dinosaurs did not have beaks. Most had teeth. Big, long, sharp, painful, caffeine stained, teeth. 

 A silver Bahaman

Birds do not have teeth.

A vain flag-waving nationalistic toothless patriot.

Why is that?

A crane. Only slightly bizarre.

Mammals survived the asteroid impact by living underground. They gradually came out of their burrows, multiplied, evolved, built civilisations and made it to the moon. And finally, before their ultimate demise, developed homeopathy.

A mandarin - (see below)

Dinosaurs didn't.

A whistler.

They survived because of two major factors. They could fly without buying EasyJet tickets, and they could eat seeds. One of the very few sources of food to survive many years of total darkness were seeds. Teeth are no good at eating seeds, not if you don't want toothache.

So they survived. And proceeded to take over the world. 

Alongside mammals. 

Who ate them...

Birds, as with their ancestors (the non-avian dinosaurs) laid eggs. Mammals kept their young inside them like huge alien parasites. 

Which do you think was the best idea?

The dinosaurs are dead. Long live the dinosaurs!

And here's one of those eggs. Spawn of the above pictured Mandarin. Fuqua Duck:

The dinosaurs are coming........