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“Hey, Jet, did you know you’re a dinosaur?” Silver said as he watered some flowers, not even looking up at Jet, who dropped the glass jar of jewels he was holding.
“WHAT? How would you even know? You’re a mammal and you’re from 200 years in the future!”
Silver laughed a little at Jet’s response.
“I have an interest in historic and prehistoric stuff, and how nature has evolved over time. It started when I found out what plants actually look like.”
“Okay, so how am I a dinosaur?”
“Evolution,” Silver said simply. “When dinosaurs went extinct, they didn’t actually all go extinct. Feathered dinosaurs survived the extinction. Eventually they evolved into birds like you!”
“That much makes some sense but what about the … taxonomy part of it?”
“Dinosaurs all evolved from the same ancestor,” Silver started, walking over to Jet. He took his phone out and brought up a phylogenetic tree. “Eventually archosaurs came along.”
Jet stared at Silver’s phone, fascinated by the graphic he was looking at.
“When the extinction happened, crocodilians and avians were the only surviving archosaurs. Archosaurs evolved from sauropods. So modern crocodilians — like crocodiles and alligators — and birds are the only living archosaurs.”
Jet excitedly looked at Silver.
“Can we go to a museum?”
“I guess if it’s okay with Wave and Storm,” Silver said nervously, smiling.
Jet ran off, smiling excitedly. He came back a small time later.
“Okay, come on!”
“Jet, you better not steal anything,” Silver said with a smirk.
“I’m going there to learn, I’m not gonna steal anything,” Jet assured him, smiling.
“Good, because if you do I’ll find out,” Silver teased.
Jet started running around excitedly when they got to the museum.
“It’s really weird to see you this excited,” Silver said. “Okay, your main ancestor would be — aha, Archeoteryx .”
Jet ran over to the fossil Silver was looking at.
“It was a primitive bird, discovered a couple hundred years ago. What I know might not be completely accurate, because most of what I’ve read is from this era and not mine.”
“It’s still really cool. I had no idea I was a dinosaur.”
Jet and Silver wandered around the museum a bit more before Jet went home to Wave and Storm, excited to tell them what he’d learned.