Here are just a few brain-buckling takeaways from “Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries,” the new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York: some dinosaurs were feathered; not all dinosaurs are extinct; birds, in fact, are dinosaurs.

If this logic doesn’t fly with you, you need to look more closely at the fossil record, preferably with Dr. Mark Norell, chairman of the Museum’s division of paleontology, curator of the “Dinosaurs” exhibit and an expert on the dinosaur-bird connection.

“Think of it,” he says. “Humans are primates because our closest ancestor is a primate, a chimp. I would consider that living birds are not only derived from dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs.”

Strangely Familiar

Norell’s conviction derives from close study of particularly well-preserved fossils of feathered and nesting dinosaurs dug up recently from a 130-million-year-old forest that existed in what is now Liaoning, China. “For the questions I’m interested in, such as the origin of birds from non-avian dinosaurs, the most relevant fossils in the world have all come from Asia,” says Norell.

“The vivid, extraordinary fossil evidence displayed in this new exhibit literally adds feathers to the theory that non-flying dinosaurs transitioned from dinosaurs to birds.”

A walk-through re-creation of this forest — populated with never-before-seen models of beaked and feathered dinosaurs, dino-eating mammals and even flying dinosaurs like Microraptor, a four-winged, feathered glider — is the centerpiece of the new exhibition.

One of the oddest facts about the Liaoning diorama is how familiar the primitive forest looks. In fact, it’s a tweaked take on the New Jersey Pine Barrens, determined by a paelobotanist to be a close contemporary match for an ancient forest. The Barrens served not only as a convenient source of inspiration for Museum artists, but for actual transplantable trees for Museum preparators.

“It looks just like a forest would look today, with subtle differences,” says Norell. “And it shows how the conventional lost world of dinosaurs was really a lot more familiar than it’s often portrayed. Even the animals look sort of familiar — frogs, little mammals. That’s leaving out the feathered dinosaurs, which come off as large, really silly looking birds.”

Confirming the Seuss-like impression is Dr. Michael Novacek, senior vice president and provost of science at the Museum and curator of paleontology. “You can imagine shops now selling to kids dinosaurs that are feathered instead of scaled. It’s kind of fun to think of the tyrannosaurus, which literally means terrible lizard, as a cute little stuffed animal.”

Field to Floor

For the past 16 years, Novacek and Norell have led yearly expeditions to the great fossil beds of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. (“At the core, I’m a bone digger,” says Novacek.) And their research, especially from the last five years, along with the Liaoning finds, significantly shapes the new exhibition.

“In the 90s, the relationships between birds and dinosaurs were widely recognized by paleontologists,” says Novacek. “But some matters were controversial, and a lot of details were rather fuzzy. The vivid, extraordinary fossil evidence displayed in this new exhibit literally adds feathers to the theory that non-flying dinosaurs transitioned from dinosaurs to birds.”

Although those fossils and that theory are certain to overturn most people’s ideas about dinosaurs, Norell conceived the show to be just as much about the scientists. “People will learn a lot about dinosaurs,” he says. “But what I’m really trying to portray is how we study dinosaurs, what the science is.”

And the big story about paleontology in the past 15 years is that it’s changed as radically as our understanding of the animals it studies. What accounts for the difference?

“It’s really three things,” says Norell. “New discoveries, new ideas and new technology — led by computation, but also digital imaging, better mass spectrometers, electron microscopes, CT scanning, even better satellite imagery for looking for fossils.”

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