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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.
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 ...
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]
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 ...
Some creationists further believe that dinosaurs survived the Biblical flood since the Bible states that "every kind of land animal" did. [12] Creationists also tend to reject the fossil evidence that many non-avian dinosaurs were feathered, since this is among the evidence that birds descended from them through evolution. [14]
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]
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.
An alternate name is Pan-Aves, or "all birds", in reference to its definition containing all animals, living or extinct, which are more closely related to birds than to crocodilians. [4] Although dinosaurs and pterosaurs were the only avemetatarsalians to survive past the end of the Triassic, other groups flourished during the Triassic.