Stuffed dinosaur for your Thanksgiving Day meal? No, this isn't a joke. In fact, a growing number of scientists are beginning to believe that modern birds, including turkeys, are living representations of the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth until about 65 million years ago.

Birds are extremely successful evolutionarily because of amazing behavioral and structural adaptations.

Many species migrate considerable distances to avoid inclement weather when food shortages become unfavorable.

If hair is a diagnostic characteristic of mammals, then feathers can be viewed as the key feature of birds. Feathers have been noted in fossil specimens of dromeosaurs, which were bird-like dinosaurs.

Today, feathers in birds enable flight, provide insulation and serve in communication. The evolution of flight in birds, however, has put some constraints on their size and shape, which is why we don't see birds as big as elephants or blue whales.

Birds are endothermic, meaning they are capable of maintaining a relatively stable body temperature. They have a four-chambered heart, and they maintain their high metabolism with an elaborate network of air sacs and relatively small lungs.

Birds always lay eggs, rather than producing live young. Furthermore, many birds, including familiar songbirds, often are monogamous, and both parents share in the raising of young.

Birds, like reptiles, have a single inner ear bone (stapes), whereas we and other mammals have three inner-ear bones.

Although birds are the best understood group of vertebrates, their evolutionary origin has been controversial. For decades, birds have been placed in the class Aves and clearly separated from that of reptiles (class Reptilia), despite early scientists being adamant that birds were nothing more than reptiles.

It wasn't until the late 1990s that scientists began to accept evidence that birds were reptiles and, hence, represented feathered dinosaurs.

No one has proven definitively that the turkey on your Thanksgiving plate or the chickadee at your birdfeeder is a "miniature tyrannosaur," but similarities between birds and dinosaurs are quite convincing.

Four notable similarities are a mobile, elongated, S-shaped neck; a three-toed foot (tridactyl) and a digitigrade (standing of toes) posture; hollow, pneumatic (containing air) bones, and an intertarsal ankle joint.

In addition, egg structure and nesting behavior of extant birds are similar to those of non-bird dinosaur lineages.

The first known bird, Archaeopteryx, occurred about 140 million years ago in the mid-Mesozoic (Jurassic Period). Birds perhaps originated in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Until fossil records become more complete, the location of bird evolution will remain a mystery. From a single lineage or perhaps from several, more than 9,000 bird species now occupy the world.

The turkey on your Thanksgiving plate is a domestic descendant of the eastern wild turkey. It was domesticated by Aztec Indians in Mexico before the Spanish conquest during the early 16th century.

Interestingly, the wild turkey would have been our national emblem, rather than the bald eagle, if Ben Franklin had had his way when our nation was founded.

The wild turkey is plentiful throughout Pennsylvania, yet it was nearly wiped out from the state in the last century and remains as one of wildlife conservation's great success stories.

So, when you enjoy your Tyrannosaurus Rex dinner on Thursday, hold off from telling your family and friends that they actually are eating a dinosaur -- it might ruin their appetite. Instead, mention it when you're all eating dessert.

Then tell them this joke: Why is a turkey (or a dinosaur) at Thanksgiving dinner like a sofa? Each is filled with stuffing.

Happy Thanksgiving!