has become well established in recent years that modern birds are direct descendants, via Archaeopteryx and other ancestors, of small, carnivorous dinosaurs (not the flying pterosaurs). The research these days is on just which branch of the dinosaur family tree birds took off from. But all the rest of the dinosaurs certainly did become extinct, and we haven't figured out exactly why yet -- perhaps some disastrous combination of climate change and an asteroid crash or two. But one thing we can be certain of is that dinosaurs did not purposely or carelessly destroy their own world. So far humans are the only animals that have ever provided themselves with the ability to do that.So not all dinosaurs were big, stupid, slow brutes. Some were small, fast, and probably warm-blooded. They were entirely successful, for great, long ages in their world. Whatever wiped them out, it wasn't their own inefficiency, because there was nothing to take their places in the ecosystem for millions of years, until mammals, freed from the domination of the great reptiles, diversified and claimed the world. And -- remember -- some of them are still here, raising their warm-blooded, feathered, but still scaly-legged young, generation after generation....
