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Paleontologist Lawrence Witmer concluded in 2009 that this evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that avian evolution went through a four-winged stage. [2] Fossil evidence also demonstrates that birds and dinosaurs shared features such as hollow, pneumatized bones, gastroliths in the digestive system, nest-building, and brooding behaviors.
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.
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 ...
Several analyses of bird fossils show divergence of species prior to the K–Pg boundary, and that duck, chicken, and ratite bird relatives coexisted with non-avian dinosaurs. [142] Large collections of bird fossils representing a range of different species provide definitive evidence for the persistence of archaic birds to within 300,000 years ...
The digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have further evolved for swimming. The study of birds is called ornithology. Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.
Modern birds evolved from flying dinosaurs, but even with just the surviving skull, the researchers say Oculudentavis is very different from modern birds. "It's a new ecology, never seen before ...