Phil is a dinosaur– a type of modern theropod.
NB: Phil does not look like this now. He is in eclipse plumage and looks positively manky.
You know what wasn’t a dinosaur?
A plesiosaur:
Plesiosaurs were more closely related to modern lizards and snakes than to dinosaurs, but we popularly think of them as marine dinosaurs.
Phil is actually a small aquatic dinosaur,who can fly (short distances and not when he’s molting).
Ivan actually fits the bill a bit better:
Somewhere a long the line people never learned that birds are living dinosaurs, and that all these bizarre expeditions to find living dinosaurs in remote parts of the world have been an utter waste of time.
Dinosaurs are all around us.
They crap on our cars.
They appear in our fast food.
And their songs wake us up in the morning.
If you have a dog that is used to hunt birds, you have a dinosaur hound.
And whether those bearded fellows from Louisiana want to admit it or not, they’ve spent their lives trying to understand how to attract and conserve several species of duck-billed dinosaur.
I don’t know why not knowing that birds are actually dinosaurs doesn’t just blow people away.
Ivan’s head skin is always fun to imagine on a theropod of more toothy and tailed proportions.
I can’t get over how you keep calling birds dinosaurs but I suppose it may be true. one specific kind of flying dinosaur.
thank you for the video, so mallards are a species of duck, which is a family of birds, which is a class of dinosaurs very neat.