• jake_eric@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I promise you that anything that says Tyrannosaurus was a direct ancestor of or the closest relative to chickens is misunderstanding the science, probably for clickbait because T. rex is a well known and eye-catching dinosaur name to put in the title, or just quoting one of the other incorrect articles about it. Birds evolved in the Jurassic about a hundred million years before T. rex, so T. rex definitely couldn’t have evolved into them. It was wiped out by the asteroid before it could evolve into anything else.

        I don’t mean to ruin the joke here, but I hate to see misinformation go uncorrected.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So my 6 year old explained this to me and it blew me mind I had to read it up to be sure.

        “Chickens didn’t exist hundreds of billions of years ago. T Rex did, but all died of the meteor. Some cousins and friends of T Rex, but not Trex, didn’t die, and had x-men like babies [mutations lol] and were more like bird x-men,and the xmen survived but kept having new x-men babies, that also had x-men babies. None of these x-men are around today, so we get to play with Chickens and Dinosaurs and the X-men toys we have because we don’t know what powers the x-men birds have.”

    • Poiar@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I have found many sources saying “yes, literally” when searching for

      “closest dinosaur relative to chickens”

      But I don’t want to go check the sites’ credentials. >Probably< the T-Rex is the direct ancestor of chickens, which was good enough for me