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The avialans Confuciusornis and Ichthyornis grew relatively quickly, following a growth trend similar to that of modern birds. [117] One of the few modern birds that exhibit slow growth is the flightless kiwi, and the authors speculated that Archaeopteryx and the kiwi had similar basal metabolic rate. [4]
"Baminornis zhenghensis looks more like modern birds than Archaeopteryx," Wang said, calling its discovery "a landmark to me and other evolutionary biologists." Until now, Archaeopteryx was the ...
The basal bird Archaeopteryx, from the Jurassic, is well known as one of the first "missing links" to be found in support of evolution in the late 19th century. Though it is not considered a direct ancestor of modern birds, it gives a fair representation of how flight evolved and how the very first bird might have looked.
Archaeopteryx also had a wing feather arrangement like that of modern birds and similarly asymmetrical flight feathers on its wings and tail. But Archaeopteryx lacked the shoulder mechanism by which modern birds' wings produce swift, powerful upstrokes (see diagram above of supracoracoideus pulley); this may mean that it and other early birds ...
Adding to this conundrum are fossilized footprints of bird-like tracks that are 210 million years old—a good 60 million years before the arrival of the genus Archaeopteryx, one of the oldest ...
The oldest-known bird, Archaeopteryx, dates to about 150 million years ago. With a mouthful of teeth and long bony tails, the earliest birds were a far cry from modern ones.
After conducting an embryological comparison with modern birds, he noticed a similarity between Archaeopteryx and the embryonic stage of birds, concluding that the former was likely an "archetype", or created kind, of the bird lineage. Owen's monograph presented a description of the osteology and the plumage, though he missed a number of elements.
Painting of Archaeopteryx by Heinrich Harder, from around 1916. The Archaeornithes, classically Archæornithes, is an extinct group of the first primitive, reptile-like birds. It is an evolutionary grade of transitional fossils, the primitive birds halfway between non avian dinosaur ancestors and the derived modern birds (avian dinosaur).