Ottawa native and paleontologist Steve Brusatte has a new book out. The dinosaur expert’s new topic is...birds.

Brusatte, who served as an advisor to the movie “Jurassic World” and is a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, recently published “The Story of Birds.” The book discusses the links between the dinosaurs and today’s winged creatures.

Brusatte, an Ottawa Township High School graduate, who is a professional paleontologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, currently is promoting his book across a U.S. tour. He agreed to a Q&A with Shaw Local.

How did a dinosaur expert come to be interested in birds? And what spurred you to identify links between the dinosaurs and today’s winged creatures?

When I first became obsessed with fossils as a teenager growing up in Ottawa, it was dinosaurs that hooked my interest first. I read every book on dinosaurs I could find. I dragged my parents and brothers to the Field Museum in Chicago and the Burpee Museum in Rockford for goodness knows how many times. I wanted to see the dinosaurs. I loved dinosaurs. I wanted to dig up dinosaurs and study dinosaurs. And I went to college and became a paleontologist and for my first research project, my mentor in Chicago, Paul Sereno, the great dinosaur hunter, gave me the bones of a huge meat-eating theropod that he found in Africa. He asked me to figure out what it was. So I learned a lot about theropods, and learned to understand that modern birds evolved from theropods — much smaller ones. And I when I truly understood that today’s birds are dinosaurs, I grew to become enthralled with birds, too.

Was there a particular species of bird that caught your eye and helped you draw ancestral links to the dinosaurs?

I will admit something kind of silly, maybe even seditious: When I was growing up I didn’t like birds very much. In fact, I was kind of afraid of them. I remember a few times that birds got into our house in Ottawa and by the way I reacted, you would think it was a wolverine in the house. I ran into my room and shut the door and didn’t come out until the bird was gone. There was just something about the flapping wings that spooked me, the manic energy. I’m better now, though, because I’ve gotten so see so many cool birds around the world and study so many bird fossils, too. And I’ve come to appreciate birds as incredible feats of nature. These are animals that can do that thing humans have long dreamed, to break the bonds of Earth and defy gravity and fly. And they totally transformed their bodies to do so. They have feathers and wings and light bones that make an incredible flying machine. They grow super fast and are warm-blooded and very smart. And they inherited all of these things from dinosaurs. They are real, true living dinosaurs. And I don’t think we appreciate that awesome fact enough.

Without giving away any spoilers — we do want people to read the book for themselves — what new fact seems to be gaining the most interest among your readers and at your presentations?

I’ve written a few books before, but this is the first time I am doing a book tour in the U.S. And it’s been a lot of fun! I’ve been in Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Bozeman, Montana; and now I’m writing you from St. Louis (where my parents have come over to see me!) and I’ll then go to Boston, and then back home to Scotland. What I’ve gathered from audiences so far is two particular areas of fascination. First, this basic but profound idea that today’s birds are dinosaurs. It still hasn’t really percolated into the pop culture. But birds are dinosaurs in the same way bats are mammals. They are just strange dinosaurs that developed wings and started to fly, and they are the only ones that live on today. Sure, a bird doesn’t look at all like a T. rex or Brontosaurus. But dinosaurs were very diverse, there were many different groups. Bats don’t look anything like an elephant or horse or monkey, but they are still mammals. The second thing is that there are so many fantastic extinct birds. Birds that once thrived, but then died out, and only their fossils remain. There were terror birds taller than humans, with heads the size of a horse’s head, capped with a hooked beak, which were the top predators in South America for tens of millions of years. There were elephant birds in Madagascar that lived up to their name — they weighed over 1,500 pounds and laid eggs the size of watermelons. There were demon ducks in Australia that were like 100 times the size of a modern duck. There were giant soaring birds that once sailed the world’s thermal wings, on wingspans 20 feet wide. And I could go on and on. Looking at the world around us today, we wouldn’t know these birds ever existed.

What was the reaction from your colleagues and your readers when you discussed your research? Were people surprised or maybe even skeptical of links between dinosaurs and birds?

In the scientific community, there is no debate: Birds are dinosaurs. They evolved from dinosaurs, they are part of the dinosaur family tree. This idea is not a new one, proclaimed by brazen young scientists. No, it goes back to the 1860s, the time of Charles Darwin, when scientists of the time recognized how similar the skeletons of birds and dinosaurs were in many aspects. Have you ever looked at a chicken foot? It has scales, it has three main toes with claws. It looks like a mini T. rex foot! So scientists have suspected this for a long time, and more recently the discovery of feathers on dinosaur fossils proved it, as did DNA evidence — you can use the DNA like a paternity test, to build family trees, and it shows that birds are embedded within the reptile family tree, they are actually more closely related to crocodiles than crocodiles are to lizards and snakes. So there is no controversy among scientists. But among the public, yeah, the idea is still a weird one for many people — and I hope the book can play a role in changing that!

If someone were to invent time travel tomorrow and we could visit the age of dinosaurs, would we recognize any of the airborne creatures? Or would the birds’ ancestors be unrecognizable to modern eyes?

It would be incredible. At the moment T. rex was rampaging across the American west, about 66 million years ago, there would have been a whole menagerie of birds flying, fluttering, flapping, gliding, and soaring overhead. Many of these were primitive birds. They still had the sharp teeth and killer claws and long tails of their raptor dinosaur ancestors. But others were much more modern. They had beaks, and light skeletons, and grew super fast, and were warm blooded. There were true members of the duck and chicken group living with T. rex. How cool is that?

What has been the reaction been so far promoting your book?

So far, so good. It has been a thrill meeting a lot of new people, especially young people interested in science, and signing the book. I’ll tell you, signing books never gets old. When I was a kid I voraciously collected autographs from baseball players and politicians and other famous people. And I still do, I still ask writers to sign books for me and athletes to sign memorabilia if I meet them. And I’m signing books for people? For kids? It still blows my mind, and I am forever grateful, and especially for my family and my teachers at Wallace Grade School and Ottawa Township High School who supported me, fostered this weird love of dinosaurs and fossils that I developed as a teenager. And that is why I dedicated this book to my parents, Jim and Roxanne Brusatte, long-time Ottawa natives, wonderful people, my heroes.