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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.
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 Egyptians also made use of birds in their hieroglyphic scripts, many of which, though stylized, are still identifiable to species. [18] Belon's comparison of birds and humans in his Book of Birds, 1555. Early written records provide valuable information on the past distributions of species.
1933 – Nagamichi Kuroda publishes Birds of the Island of Java (2 Volumes, 1933–36). 1934 – Roger Tory Peterson publishes his Guide to the Birds, the first modern field guide. 1934–37 – Brian Roberts is the expedition ornithologist on John Rymill's British Graham Land Expedition (BGLE).
Here's a riddle: how did an order of flightless birds manage to spread to places they would have had to fly to? Rheas live in South America, cassowaries and emus in Australia, kiwis in New Zealand ...
Modern birds would have expanded from West Gondwana through two routes. One route was an Antarctic interchange in the Paleogene. The other route was probably via Paleocene land bridges between South America and North America, which allowed for the rapid expansion and diversification of Neornithes into the Holarctic and Paleotropics. [7]
Neoaves is a clade that consists of all modern birds (Neornithes or Aves) with the exception of Palaeognathae (ratites and kin) and Galloanserae (ducks, chickens and kin). [4] This group is defined in the PhyloCode by George Sangster and colleagues in 2022 as "the most inclusive crown clade containing Passer domesticus , but not Gallus gallus ...
The oldest fossil evidence for paravians — the dinosaur group that includes the earliest birds and their closest relatives — appears around the middle of the Jurassic Period (201.3 million to ...