Georgia Elementary School Trades One Dinosaur for Another

If the principal of Thomson Elementary School in Thomson, Georgia, thinks she has rid her school of dinosaurs, the joke's on her. According to the McDuffie Mirror, principal Anita Cummings recently decided to paint over a dinosaur mural and remove dinosaur tracks from the school because:

The dinosaur does not represent what Thomson Elementary School is all about. ... We are no where near extinction because we still have lots of places to go...

Instead Cummings chose the bald eagle to be the school's mascot, but in doing so she has just traded some extinct dinosaurs for a living one. As has been said over and over again on this blog, birds are the living descendants of feathered theropod dinosaurs, and that includes eagles. A dinosaur will still be the mascot of Thomson Elementary, even if it does not look quite like its prehistoric relatives.

Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.