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The scientific question of within which larger group of animals birds evolved has traditionally been called the " origin of birds ". The present scientific consensus is that birds are a group of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era. A close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was first proposed in the ...
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 ...
Maniraptora is a clade of coelurosaurian dinosaurs which includes the birds and the non-avian dinosaurs that were more closely related to them than to Ornithomimus velox. It contains the major subgroups Avialae, Dromaeosauridae, Troodontidae, Oviraptorosauria, and Therizinosauria. Ornitholestes and the Alvarezsauroidea are also often included.
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 ...
The shared history of birds and dinosaurs is well-established, but exactly how true birds evolved during the Mesozoic is a bit of a mystery. Adding to this conundrum are fossilized footprints of ...
Aves can mean those feathered dinosaurs that can fly (alternately Avialae) Aves can mean the last common ancestor of all the currently living birds and all of its descendants (a "crown group"). (alternatively Neornithes) Under the fourth definition Archaeopteryx is an avialan, and not a member of Aves. Gauthier's proposals have been adopted by ...
Birds evolved from certain feathered theropod dinosaurs, and there is no real dividing line between birds and non-avian dinosaurs except that some of the former survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event while the latter did not. For the purposes of this article, a 'bird' is considered to be any member of the clade Avialae. [1]
Avemetatarsalia (meaning "bird metatarsals ") is a clade of diapsid reptiles containing all archosaurs more closely related to birds than to crocodilians. [2] The two most successful groups of avemetatarsalians were the dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Dinosaurs were the largest terrestrial animals for much of the Mesozoic Era, and one group of small ...