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If any species of bird illustrates the fact that our feathered friends are the direct descendants of dinosaurs, it’s the roadrunner.

Based on our popular image of dinosaurs, the roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) certainly looks the part: upright stance, powerful legs, beak designed to mess you up, a murderous glint in the eye.

In the Warner brothers cartoons, the roadrunner was depicted as genial and benign. His live-and-let-live attitude was interrupted only when he had to deal with his hopelessly incompetent nemesis, Wile E. Coyote.

But in reality, roadrunners are serious predators. They are fairly large, about 18-22 inches tall, and can run at up to 20 miles per hour. And they will eat virtually anything. Their diet includes grasshoppers, beetles, snails, centipedes, spiders, scorpions, lizards, mice, small birds, and snakes.

Roadrunner are so quick and lethal that they will hunt and kill rattlesnakes. Not many animals are tough enough to do that.

Roadrunners can fly, but being so well adapted to running, they usually take flight only to escape predators.

They often become habituated to the presence of people. I guess they ain’t skeered of nothin’.

Which brings me to the reason for this post: to describe an incident involving a roadrunner that I witnessed some years ago. It happened fast and almost literally underfoot — but I have photos.

In December 2005, I spent three fascinating days at Death Valley National Park. On the first day, after checking into the Furnace Creek Inn, I walked over to the visitor center to get oriented.

When I came out a while later, I noticed a large number of birds in the parking lot — small, brown, finch-looking things, 50 or more of them in close proximity, hopping and chirping around the pavement.

Suddenly, something flashed into my field of vision from the right.

Simultaneously, the birds, all of them, went nuts. Amid a din of frantic squawking and flapping, they took flight in every direction. All except one unfortunate fellow.

Owing to dumb luck, I had my camera at the ready. I turned and got this photo.

Note how the image captured the speeding roadrunner poised several inches in the air above his shadow on the pavement.

The roadrunner sprinted across the road and into the desert at full speed. I captured this final photo before he disappeared around a dune. Again, the roadrunner was zipping along so fast, the camera shows him suspended above the ground.

The entire episode lasted about five seconds.

Ages ago, a creature that operated in a similar manner was the Velociraptor.

I don’t mean the malevolent beasts you remember from the movie “Jurassic Park.” Those creatures were not Velociraptors. They were based on Deinonychus, a cousin of Velociraptor that was six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. Spielberg appropriated the name Velociraptor because it sounds better.

Real Velociraptors (Velociraptor mongoliensis) are thought to have been tough and aggressive, but so small — 30 pounds, the size of a chicken —  that most prey animals were out of their league.

They probably had feathers. Evidence suggests that they hunted alone, not in packs.

Educated guesses of the appearance of the real Velociraptor, a native of Mongolia.

But they were fierce predators, and in their day, the small critters of the world probably feared them greatly. Very much like the roadrunner today.

The name Velociraptor is derived from the Latin words velox (swift) and raptor (robber, plunderer). “Speedy thief” is the usual translation.

Today’s “speedy thief,” the roadrunner, is indeed a worthy successor.

Rattlesnakes, beware.