theropod

They're mean, cannibalistic, and I can easily see them evolving gigantism like other theropod did and becoming apex predators.

T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.

From Wikipedia: > Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

There's just theropods, some of which happened to survive, where people call the descendant species of those particular theropod species birds.

There’s a school of thought/fantasy that the dinosaurs actually had an advanced theropod civilization.

All birds, including chickens, are feathered theropod dinosaurs, which are a type of archosaur.

Wikipedia quote: Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

The assumption right now is that every theropod had feathers of some kind somewhere.

> The chicken is the closest living relative to theropod dinosaurs.

All birds are classified as theropod dinosaurs (also a clade).

My favorite example of this is that powered flight may have been acquired three or more times in closely related but distinct groups of theropod dinosaurs.

If the killer meteorite had waited a few million more years some intelligent descendants of theropod dinosaurs might have sent up a rocket to stop it.

There are some birds even now that are "obviously" theropod dinosaurs (all birds are dinosaurs, but some are phenotypically closer to their ancestors than others).

I googled Troodon and the first result says it's "a dubious small bird-like Theropod".

>"birds" are essentially defined as the set of theropod species that survived the K-T extinction.

From there, it was just three clicks to the article I needed [0], which, incidentally, stated that "The present scientific consensus is that birds are a group of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era".