Same technique as Australia's bush turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapode#/media/File:Brushturk...

A more direct link than a crocodile, as birds came from dinosaurs.

I would love to know the day-to-day ins and outs of being a archaeologist in today's world. A glamorous edition is "the fly around the world to exotic places to find fossils", but I'd love any good books or blogs that talk about the nitty gritty details I wouldn't expect or even know to look for.

You mean paleontologist. Finding new fossils is a tiny part of their work. Mostly it's analysing existing fossils, general research and teaching.

As a complete layman, I wonder if it's not how adaptive life is and instead how infectious survival is.

Very Sad.

So big ass dinosaurs did in fact have big asses