How did bird dinosaurs survive the meteor?
But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids
Vermont Public
4.3 • 5.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Many of you have learned about the meteorite that scientists say hit the earth 66 million years ago and killed off many dinosaur species. But some dinosaurs survived, and the birds you see flying around today are their direct descendants! In this episode we trace the connection between modern birds and prehistoric dinosaurs. Other questions include:
- Were any dinosaurs mammals?
- How did bird dinosaurs survive?
- Are crocodiles related to dinosaurs?
- Did dinosaurs have feathers? How do we know?
- Did all dinosaurs lay eggs?
Our guest is Dr. Emily Bamforth, curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In a world where some baby teeth are considered powerfully magical, |
| 0:05.0 | tooth-related crimes are especially gummy. |
| 0:08.0 | The heroes who investigate these cases are members of an elite squad known as the Tooth Fairy Detectives. |
| 0:14.0 | This is the story of how one of those winged legends saved the world. |
| 0:19.0 | Ruby, Tooth Fairy Detective on Apple Podcasts, |
| 0:22.3 | or go to GSMShows.com for more information. This is but why a podcast for curious kids from Vermont public. |
| 0:53.3 | I'm Jane Lindholm. |
| 0:56.0 | On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. We've gotten thousands of questions, and hundreds of |
| 1:03.8 | them are about dinosaurs. We took a really cool field trip to Texas a few years ago to look at some |
| 1:10.3 | newly uncovered dinosaur footprints |
| 1:12.6 | in a dry riverbed and to make an episode all about these prehistoric beasts. But that only scratched |
| 1:19.3 | the surface of all the questions we've gotten about dinosaurs. So today we're going to tackle a chunk |
| 1:24.9 | more of them, and we're going to be doing it with a paleontologist. |
| 1:29.1 | My name is Dr. Emily Bamforth. |
| 1:31.0 | I am a paleontologist and the curator of the Philip J. Curry Dinosaur Museum. |
| 1:36.3 | So paleontology is actually a pretty broad field. |
| 1:39.5 | There are paleontologists that just study dinosaurs. |
| 1:42.2 | But paleontology is actually the study of fossils. So anything that fossilizes gets studied by paleontologists that just study dinosaurs, but paleontology is actually the study of fossils. |
| 1:44.9 | So anything that fossilizes gets studied by paleontologists, so whether that's bugs or plants or fish or even bacteria, anything that was alive and is now dead and fossilized, that's what paleontologists study. |
| 1:58.6 | Emily Bamforth does study dinosaurs and all the things that lived with them from her home base in Alberta, Canada. |
| 2:04.9 | That includes going out and finding them, digging them up, bring them back to museum, preparing them, and taking care of those collections once they're in the museum. |
| 2:12.5 | And then telling the world about all the stuff we found. |
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