Turkey: your delicious Christmas dinner dinosaur

The evolutionary history of birds as dinosaurs is quite apparent, even in a turkey on your dining table

The fact that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs is now and overwhelmingly supported theory in palaeontology, though most will not know much beyond the recent plethora of discoveries of feathered dinosaurs. While these are obviously a wonderful example, the ancestry of birds is more than skin (or feather) deep and since mostly palaeontologists work from bones it may not be a surprise to learn that you can see plenty of dinosaurian traits in your Christmas dinner.

A typical roasting turkey is already missing the head, probably the neck and the feet, all of which contain some key traits to identify them as dinosaurs. Still, as you carve your way through your dinosaurian dinner there are plenty of features remaining that can point you to the evolutionary history of the main course. Although birds have the best part of 140 million years of adaptation to flight behind them (and then quite a lot of change wrought by domestic breeders) there are multiple features that can easily be traced between them and their predecessors. Let's start with one that should be familiar to everyone - the wishbone.