If there's one thing everyone knows about the dinosaurs, it's that they're dead. In fact, they're synonymous with deadness, like disco or doornails or Francisco Franco. About 65 million years ago, an asteroid collided with Earth, splashing down in a shallow sea off the coast of what is today Mexico. The dinosaurs, probably already made vulnerable by a million years of climate shifts, didn't stand a chance against a rock the size of Manhattan. Mile-high tsunamis, volcanoes and earthquakes, shock waves circling the globe, rains of molten glass, a year of complete darkness. It was literally lights out for them.
Or so the story went for many years. In the 1970s, an American paleontologist named John Ostrom pushed back against the century-old idea that dinosaurs were lumbering reptiles, and argued that they were in fact more closely related to modern birds. The discovery of Chinese dinosaur fossils preserved with feathers intact vindicated Ostrom's radical theory. This new vision of dinosaurs got a massive audience in Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie Jurassic Park, which ends with a paleontologist lost in thought as he watches a flock of pelicans, marveling at these dinosaur descendants.
In fact, the truth is even weirder than that. According to our current taxonomic classification, birds aren’t just descendants of theropod dinosaurs—they are theropod dinosaurs! Modern birds are members of Maniraptora, the same dinosaur clade that included Velociraptor, Troodon, Archaeopteryx, and lots of other old favorites. The asteroid collision that ended the Cretaceous period did kill every land animal larger than a dog—but that wasn’t all the dinosaurs. It was just all the non-avian dinosaurs. Lots of little dinosaurs survived, and they and their cousins are still flying the friendly skies. So plenty of common dino facts you remember from third grade are actually wrong. The smallest known dinosaur, for example, wasn’t Microraptor or Compsognathus. It's the two-inch-long bee hummingbird, and it's still buzzing around the tropical hills of Cuba today.
Quick Quiz: What was the first species of flying reptile ever identified, a non-dinosaur of the late Jurassic whose name means "winged finger"?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.