Say "dinosaur" and people always think of the big bulky ones. Thus the difficulty of imagining them as being related to birds. Yet do an anatomical comparison between Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx and the similarities outweigh the dissimilarities, so much so that Gregory Paul, a noted "Dino Doc", speculates that Velociraptor was evolved from an originally flying animal, and became flightless like other big predatory birds like Diatryma or <Phororhacos.

So too with panspermia - if we think of some bacterium that a UV light can kill then panspermia seems absurd, but if we look at Deinococcus radiodurans the picture changes utterly. Its incredible self-repair abilities don't seem to make sense anywhere but in a high-radiation environment like space, or the reactor cooling ponds it was first discovered in.

And even the bulky dinosaurs have some surprises, like the discovery of feather-like quills on Protoceratops which is as unlike a bird as Cretaceous dinosaurs get.