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An alternate theory to the dinosaurian origin of birds, espoused by a few scientists, notably Larry Martin and Alan Feduccia, states that birds (including maniraptoran "dinosaurs") evolved from early archosaurs like Longisquama. [9] This theory is contested by most other paleontologists and experts in feather development and evolution. [10]
A turning point came in the early twentieth century with the writings of Gerhard Heilmann of Denmark.An artist by trade, Heilmann had a scholarly interest in birds and from 1913 to 1916, expanding on earlier work by Othenio Abel, [12] published the results of his research in several parts, dealing with the anatomy, embryology, behavior, paleontology, and evolution of birds. [13]
The WAIR hypothesis, a version of the "cursorial model" of the evolution of avian flight, in which birds' wings originated from forelimb modifications that provided downforce, enabling the proto-birds to run up extremely steep slopes such as the trunks of trees, was prompted by observation of young chukar chicks, and proposes that wings ...
However, the evolutionary transition from dinosaur to bird and the timing of the birds’ origin are still contested,” the paper reads. “That these tracks of southern Africa, dating to the ...
Feduccia's research has focused on ornithology, evolutionary biology, vertebrate history and morphogenesis, and the tempo and mode of the Cenozoic vertebrate radiation. His early work in the 1970s focused on clarification of the evolutionary history of modern birds (), focusing, in particular, on the identification of conserved morphological characters that might elucidate phylogeny more ...
Nonetheless, these birds were to play an important part in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. On the Galápagos Islands and afterward, Darwin thought in terms of "centres of creation" and rejected ideas concerning the transmutation of species . [ 12 ]
Paleornithology, also known as avian paleontology, is the scientific study of bird evolution and fossil birds. It is a hybrid of ornithology and paleontology. Paleornithology began with the discovery of Archaeopteryx. The reptilian relationship of birds and their ancestors, the theropod dinosaurs, are important aspects of paleornithological ...
His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced), based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical underpinning for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.