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    Short WaveSome Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
    13 minEpisode 1205

    Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?

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    When you picture a dinosaur, what does it look like? For Jingmai O'Connor, paleobiologist and associate curator of reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago, the dinosaurs she studies look a lot more like birds.

    "If you looked at an artist's reconstruction of something like Velociraptor or Microraptor ... you would see that it pretty much looks the same as a bird," Jingmai says. "In terms of the plumage, the soft tissues covering the body, it would have looked very, very birdlike."

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    © NPRLength 13 min15 January 2025Episode 1205ScienceFactsEducationalUSAEpisodic

    Introducing Short Wave

    Introducing Short Wave

    This is an episodic podcast, so you can listen to it in any order, but episode one is a great place to start.

    Listen to episode one here
    11+ScienceFactsEducationalUSAEpisodic15 January 2025© NPR

    When you picture a dinosaur, what does it look like? For Jingmai O'Connor, paleobiologist and associate curator of reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago, the dinosaurs she studies look a lot more like birds.

    "If you looked at an artist's reconstruction of something like Velociraptor or Microraptor ... you would see that it pretty much looks the same as a bird," Jingmai says. "In terms of the plumage, the soft tissues covering the body, it would have looked very, very birdlike."

    In this episode, Short Wave delves into the dinosaur-avian connection. Which dinosaurs had feathers? Were they using them to fly? And once and for all – what are those ancient dinosaurs' relationship to birds today?

    Have other dinosaur questions you want us to unravel? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!

    Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

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