Birds: The dinosaurs that forgot to die | with Steve Brusatte
Birds are dinosaurs. Not descended from them in some distant, diluted way, but living members of the same group, cousins of T. rex and Triceratops.In 1868, Thomas Henry Huxley stood in this very theatre and argued to a Victorian audience that birds had evolved from reptiles. His idea fell out of favour for decades, then returned with a dinosaur dug up in the Montana badlands, and was sealed by feathered fossils found by farmers in China.
In this talk, palaeontologist Steve Brusatte picks up Huxley’s story and follows it 150 million years: how feathers and wings evolved before flight, how the first true birds took to the air, and why the birds with beaks survived the asteroid that wiped out the rest of the dinosaurs. Along the way he travels from Antarctic fossil digs to a New Mexico desert, to the last dinosaur outpost in New Zealand, and ends with a look at how humans are shaping bird evolution today.
Steve Brusatte is Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He has named and described over two dozen new species of dinosaurs and other fossils, and published over 200 research papers on the anatomy, genealogy, and evolution of extinct species. He is a keen populariser of science and his books The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Story of Birds have been New York Times bestsellers, and translated into dozens of languages. He is the paleontology consultant for the Jurassic World film franchise and BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs.
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This was filmed at the Royal Institution on the 26th of September 2026.
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:31 Huxley’s 1868 lecture at the Ri
4:22 Huxley’s two-part proof: Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus
10:24 Ostrom, Deinonychus and the return of the dinosaur-bird link
11:38 Velociraptor: Jurassic Park vs reality
13:06 The feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning
15:31 Embryos, nests and the dinosaur inside every bird
18:30 How feathers and wings evolved
28:59 The first true birds
35:48 The asteroid and the birds that survived it
47:18 Flightless birds and the last dinosaur outpost
52:20 Giant birds, the dodo and extinction
57:17 Birds today: Darwin’s finches and chickens
1:00:01 Birds are living dinosaurs
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