Studying dinosaurs, which went extinct millions of years ago, presents challenges, yet there are fascinating insights about their closest living relatives. You might assume that reptiles are the nearest relatives to dinosaurs, but this isn’t entirely accurate.
Often, when people hear “dinosaurs,” they think of cinematic portrayals rather than scientific research. For instance, the mention of T-Rex likely conjures images from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies rather than the latest paleontological findings.
However, contrary to the scaly and dark-colored depiction seen in films, scientific research indicates that dinosaurs’ closest relatives are, in fact, birds. This idea has been supported by various studies.
In 2008, scientists conducted a molecular analysis on a fragment of 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein. This analysis compared the protein to those from a wide range of animals.
Extracting dinosaur proteins is complex due to their ancient existence, but researchers fortuitously found unfossilized material within a T. rex bone. From this, they managed to isolate collagen molecules, a structural protein varying across species.
The comparison involved proteins from 21 living species, including humans, chimpanzees, mice, chickens, ostriches, alligators, and salmon. The proteins from alligators were relatively similar, but the closest matches were found with chickens and ostriches.
Although chickens and ostriches are not closely related, this finding doesn’t pinpoint which bird species are the closest to the well-known carnivorous dinosaur.
Chris Organ, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, noted that further research is needed to clarify the evolutionary links between chickens, ostriches, alligators, and dinosaurs.
He mentioned: “From T. rex, we were able to establish these relationships with a relatively high degree of support. With more data, we’d likely see the T. rex branch on the phylogenetic tree between alligators and chickens and ostriches, though we can’t resolve this position with currently available data.”