One Branch Survived

Think of the dinosaur family as a huge tree. The asteroid did not burn the whole tree down — it snapped off nearly every branch but one. That surviving twig was a group of small, feathered, beaked theropods. Everything we call a bird today, from the ostrich to the hummingbird, grew out of that single twig. The dinosaurs did not vanish 66 million years ago. They got pruned back to one line that quietly carried on.