Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living anc… - Mark Norell
" "Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living ancestor of birds, which is the crocodile. If you look at characteristics that birds and crocodiles have in common, the explanation is that the trait was in the common ancestor that birds and crocodiles had at one time.
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About Mark Norell
Mark Norell (July 26, 1957 – September 9, 2025) was an American paleontologist and molecular geneticist, acknowledged as one of the most important living vertebrate paleontologists. He was recently the chairman of paleontology and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is best known as the discoverer of the first theropod embryo and for the description of feathered dinosaurs.
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Alternative Names:
Mark Allen Norell
•
Mark A. Norell
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Additional quotes by Mark Norell
The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.
If you look at crocodiles today, they aren’t really representative of what the lineage of crocodiles look like. Crocodiles are represented by about 23 species, plus or minus a couple. Along that lineage the more primitive members weren’t aquatic. A lot of them were bipedal, a lot of them looked like little dinosaurs. Some were armored, others had no teeth. They were all fully terrestrial. So this is just the last vestige of that radiation that we’re seeing. And the ancestor of both dinosaurs and crocodiles would have, to the untrained eye, looked much more like a dinosaur.
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