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Debates about the origin of bird flight are almost as old as the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which arose soon after the discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1862. Two theories have dominated most of the discussion since then: the cursorial ("from the ground up") theory proposes that birds evolved from small, fast predators that ran on the ...
Ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaurs had a pelvis shape similar to that of birds, or avian dinosaurs, which evolved from saurischian (lizard-hipped) dinosaurs. [71] The Heterodontosauridae evolved a tibiotarsus which is also found in modern birds. These groups are not closely related. [72] Ankylosaurs and glyptodont mammals both had spiked ...
An alternate name is Pan-Aves, or "all birds", in reference to its definition containing all animals, living or extinct, which are more closely related to birds than to crocodilians. [4] Although dinosaurs and pterosaurs were the only avemetatarsalians to survive past the end of the Triassic, other groups flourished during the Triassic.
The age of the dinosaurs never really ended—it only evolved. Birds (and their more reptilian cousins, the Crocodilia ) are the modern-day legacy of dinosaur’s 165-million-year-long stint on Earth.
The evolution of birds began in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from a clade of theropod dinosaurs named Paraves. [1] Birds are categorized as a biological class , Aves. For more than a century, the small theropod dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica from the Late Jurassic period was considered to have been the earliest bird.
The evolution of birds is thought to have begun in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. The earliest known species in Aves is Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period. Modern phylogenetics place birds in the dinosaur clade Theropoda.
These features make Archaeopteryx a clear candidate for a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds, [15] making it important in the study both of dinosaurs and of the origin of birds. The first complete specimen was announced in 1861, and ten more Archaeopteryx fossils have been found since then. Most of the eleven known fossils include ...
Researchers unearthed the skull of a previously unknown starling-sized bird species named Navaornis hestiae that was so well preserved they were able to digitally reconstruct its brain and inner ...