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." 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…