Mick Hartley

From a WaPo gallery of images taken from photographer Robert Clarke's new book Evolution: A Visual Record:

Not so long ago, it was a controversial theory, but now it’s widely accepted: Birds aren’t just dinosaur-like; they are in fact living dinosaurs. That’s true of everything from sparrows to eagles to Darwin’s finches — but it’s rarely more obvious than when looking at a southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius), the flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea that at 5 feet tall and over 100 pounds is one of the largest and heaviest birds on Earth. (Robert Clark/Courtesy of Phaidon)

And if modern birds like the cassowary are so brightly coloured, does this not suggest that many dinosaurs were too?