"Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living ancestor of birds, which is the crocodile. If you look at characteristics that birds and crocodiles have in common, the explanation is that the trait was in the common ancestor that birds and crocodiles had at one time."
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Biologists from the United StatesYale University alumniPaleontologists from the United StatesPeople from Saint PaulGeneticists
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Mark Norell
Mark Norell (July 26, 1957 – September 9, 2025) was an American paleontologist and molecular geneticist, acknowledged as one of the most important living vertebrate paleontologists. He was recently the chairman of paleontology and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is best known as the discoverer of the first theropod embryo and for the description of feathered dinosaurs.
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