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Autistic Reddit atheists will tell you, whether you invite them to or not, that ackshully Noah wasn’t real and didn’t save all the animals on the ark. After all, they scoff, where are the dinosaurs? A moment’s refection will serve to dispense with this line of reasoning, as dinosaurs are still very much with us, simply in a more human-accommodating, postdiluvian form. Indeed, you may have one in your home right now.

I mean of course birds. Yes, even girlboss scientists have recently confirmed what many amateur theorists (and presumably activists among birds themselves) have long maintained, that modern avians are essentially smaller, statue-bedefacating versions of Theropods, that class of dinosaurs which includes the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. That cardinal munching seeds at your grandma’s bird feeder is the descendant of some eight-ton horror from the Cretaceous. They actually wuz kangz and shiet.

As the example of the seagull illustrates, however, there has been a notable decline in phenotypic majesty over the last few hundred-million years or so. What were once hulking, brontosaurus-slaying monsters are now tiny, colorful, harmless creatures, apart from their occasional propensity to drive some of the greatest minds of modernity into madness. If a bird kills a human, for the most part, it’s because it was undercooked. However, there are exceptions.

Among birds, as with people, there are those who keep to the old ways. Birds who make the conscious choice to live according to timeless values, adapting to modernity on their own terms while otherwise holding fast to an ancestral mindset. And while, strictly speaking, they might not approach the size of the greatest dinosaurs, theirs is a tradeoff involving an exchange of pure conspicuousness for an appropriate combination of threat-mass and gray man capacity for moving unnoticed by the dead but watchful eye of Globohomo. There is one bird that exemplifies these principles more than any other: the cassowary.