For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pira Lewis, in for Rachel Feldman.

From television shows like Land of the Lost in Terra Nova to the blockbuster Jurassic

Park movie franchise, Hollywood loves to envision what it would mean for humans to live

alongside dinosaurs. But the truth is, we already do. Birds, after all, are dinosaurs. But how did birds survive

the extinction event that killed so many non-avian dinosaurs? Steve Broussotti, a professor of

paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of the upcoming book,

The Story of Birds, dug into the subject of bird survival and the May issue of Scientific American.

He's here today to speak with us about it. Thanks so much for joining us today, Steve.

My pleasure, Kendra. Thank you. So it's funny because I think most people by now know that birds are

dinosaurs, but I don't think most of us really kind of think about how they survived while

like dinosaur species, like the T-Rex didn't.

You recently wrote a feature for Scientific American digging into how birds survived.

What interested you in the subject?

Yeah.

So the article I wrote for Scientific American, it tackles that question, which really has been a mystery for a long time among paleontologists, why is it that

birds were the only dinosaurs to survive that asteroid that fell out of the sky 66 million years ago

and changed the trajectory of evolution? And this is also something I write about in the story of

birds. It's in one of the middle chapters. So the book

tells the whole story of birds, how they evolve from dinosaurs, what it means that birds are

dinosaurs, how birds survive the asteroid, and then all the amazing things birds have done since

then. But of that entire story, I really do think it is this mystery of, why did birds have what it took to get through

that asteroid, to stare down that asteroid, to endure that worst day in the history of life?

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