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The evolutionary trend among birds has been the reduction of anatomical elements to save weight. The first element to disappear was the bony tail, being reduced to a pygostyle and the tail function taken over by feathers. Confuciusornis is an example of their trend. While keeping the clawed fingers, perhaps for climbing, it had a pygostyle tail ...
The fossil history of flowering plants records the development of flowers and other distinctive structures of the angiosperms, now the dominant group of plants on land.The history is controversial as flowering plants appear in great diversity in the Cretaceous, with scanty and debatable records before that, creating a puzzle for evolutionary biologists that Charles Darwin named an "abominable ...
Earliest ostriches, trees representative of most major groups of oaks have appeared by now. [102] 20 Ma First giraffes, hyenas, and giant anteaters, increase in bird diversity. 17 Ma First birds of the genus Corvus (crows). 15 Ma Genus Mammut appears in the fossil record, first bovids and kangaroos, diversity in Australian megafauna. 10 Ma
The Jurassic was the height of archosaur diversity, and the first birds and eutherian mammals also appeared. Some have argued that insects diversified in symbiosis with angiosperms, because insect anatomy, especially the mouth parts, seems particularly well-suited for flowering plants. However, all major insect mouth parts preceded angiosperms ...
The KTR is traditionally considered to have started in the Early Cretaceous and continued to the Late Cretaceous, [3] from around 125 Mya to 80 Mya. [2] Alternatively, according to Michael Benton, the ATR is proposed to have lasted from 100 Ma, when the first highly diverse angiosperm leaf floras are known, to 50 Ma, during the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, by which point most crown lineages ...
A new analysis of three-toed fossil footprints that date back more than 210 million years reveals that they were created by bipedal reptiles with feet like a bird’s.
These are the oldest known trees of the world's first forests. Prototaxites was the fruiting body of an enormous fungus that stood more than 8 meters tall. By the end of the Devonian, the first seed-forming plants had appeared. This rapid appearance of so many plant groups and growth forms has been called the "Devonian Explosion".
Chances are high that one of the first things that comes to mind is not Earth itself, but a map of it. One map in particular: Credit: Getty Images. Known as the Mercator projection, after the cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who first conceived of it in 1569, it’s ubiquitous in classrooms around the world. The map demands authority.