EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Sparrow Leg or Tiny Dinosaur?

Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis), Family Passerellidae
Bodega Bay, California, USA

Explanation:  My, yes, this looks like the leg and foot of the star of an iconic dinosaur movie!  But this is a mere sparrow that I discovered along the modern-day central coast of California.  

Current theory holds that evolutionary changes in dinosaurs took some time to eventually produce ancient, then modern-day, birds.  This change was already underway some 150 to 200 million years ago.  

Some studies have even revealed how the same walking gait in some birds appeared in the fossil records of Mesozoic dinosaur tracks (Turner et al. 2020)!  

So, the next time you hear or see a bird, change your perspective.  

The leg I photographed belonged to this Savannah Sparrow.
It was intact, with no obvious cause of its demise. 

Information:
    Turner, M.L., P.L. Falkingham, and S.M. Gatesy.  2020.  It's in the loop: shared sub-surface foot kinematics in birds and other dinosaurs shed light on a new dimension of fossil track diversity.  Biology Letters 16(7):https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0309.