Scientific American’s “Science Quickly” had an interview with Steve Brusatte on a recent episode. Steve’s new book “The Story of Birds” is available to day April 28th, 2026.

The dinosaurs at your window: How birds survived the asteroid that killed all other dinosaurs

How a few unique traits helped modern-style birds—the last living dinosaurs—survive the asteroid apocalypse that took out T. rex and other mighty beasts

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

From television shows like Land of the Lost and Terra Nova to the blockbuster Jurassic Park movie franchise, Hollywood loves to envision what it would mean for humans to live alongside dinosaurs.

But the truth is we already do. Birds, after all, are dinosaurs. But how did birds survive the extinction event that killed so many non-avian dinosaurs?

Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the upcoming book The Story of Birds, dug into the subject of bird survival in the May issue of Scientific American. He’s here today to speak with us about it.

Thanks so much for joining us today, Steve.

Steve Brusatte: My pleasure, Kendra. Thank you.

Pierre-Louis: So it’s funny because I think most people by now know that birds are dinosaurs, but I don’t think most of us really kind of think about how they survived while, like, dinosaur species like the T. rex didn’t. You recently wrote a feature for Scientific American digging into how birds survived. What interested you in the subject?

Brusatte: Yeah, so the article I wrote for Scientific American, it tackles that question, which really has been a mystery for a long time among paleontologists: Why is it that birds were the only dinosaurs to survive that asteroid that fell out of the sky 66 million years ago and changed the trajectory of evolution?

And this is also something I write about in The Story of Birds; it’s in one of the middle chapters. So the book tells the whole story of birds: how they evolve from dinosaurs, what it means that birds are dinosaurs, how birds survive the asteroid and then all the amazing things birds have done since then. But of that entire story, I really do think it is this mystery of “Why did birds have what it took to get through that asteroid, to stare down that asteroid, to endure that worst day in the, the history of life?”