[PHOTO] Emu, looking back, High Park Zoo

[rfmcdonald]

I love visiting the High Park Zoo to see its resident emus, I have lately realized, because emus provide visual proof that dinosaurs have continued to the present day. Dinosaurs are not, as the consensus of a few decades' ago would have had it, a vast grouping of life that went extinct. Dinosaurs have, rather, continued, evolving after the Cretaceous into a plethora of new and highly capable species. Some of these species look at a first glance less like their distant fossil ancestors than others, but others--the emu and other flightless birds--like so like the dinosaurs of old that it is surprising it was ever thought birds were not dinosaurs.

Things hang around--it's just a matter of looking for them.