Are the dinosaurs still alive? If you’ve seen a cassowary leg, you might think so! Cassowary No dinosaurs, but they are one of the closest living relatives. Let’s see how cassowaries and dinosaurs are similar!
Are cassowaries dinosaurs?
Take a look at the image in the tweet embedded below and say the first word that comes to mind.
If you thought it was some kind of dinosaur leg, you are not alone! This is actually an image of the foot of a cassowary taken in 2019. It shows the characteristic 5-inch claws that grow on the legs of cassowaries, and their scaly legs that are similar to most dinosaur depictions.
The closest relatives of dinosaurs are birds. Both dinosaurs and birds have extremely light bones. In the case of dinosaurs, this helped them become very much big, he helped the birds to fly.
Cassowaries are one of 60 species of flightless birds. Even rarer is their size. While huge flightless birds such as the elephant bird (which weighed up to 1,600 pounds) and the moa (which weighed up to 550 pounds) recently roamed the Earth, very few remain today.
In addition to the cassowary, flightless birds such as ostriches, emus, and nandas can weigh over 100 pounds.
Recent dinosaur discovery looks like cassowary
Take a look at the image above and tell us what is unique about this cassowary image.
If you answered: “this is not a picture of cassowaries, “You are absolutely right!
This image is from a recently published scientific study of a new dinosaur species called Coritoraptor jacobsi. This piece demonstrates how similar this species is to modern cassowaries.
Even more striking is the side-by-side comparison CoritoraptorSkeleton versus modern cassowary skeleton.
In the image below, images A and B show an analysis of the skull of a recently discovered dinosaur. Figure C shows an artist’s drawing of what a dinosaur head might look like.
Compare this to F, which depicts the skull of a modern cassowary. It’s very similar! The bottom three images compare the crest on the top of the cassowary’s skull to the crest on an extinct dinosaur. This shows that the materials are very similar!
It is believed that the ancient cousins of the cassowary first appeared shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs, about 60 million years ago. So while cassowaries are not directly related to this dinosaur, the discovery does shed light on how similar they are to some long-lost dinosaur species!