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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 evolution of birds is thought to have begun in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. The earliest known species in Aves is Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period. Modern phylogenetics place birds in the dinosaur clade Theropoda.
Each of the roughly 11,000 species of birds on Earth today is classified into one of two groups, based on the arrangement of their palate bones. Fossil ‘overturns more than a century of ...
Birds (and their more reptilian cousins, the Crocodilia) are the modern-day legacy of dinosaur’s 165-million-year-long stint on Earth. While our avian friends’ Mesozoic origin story isn’t up ...
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]
Gastornis, a large flightless bird, appears in the fossil record. 55 Ma Modern bird groups diversify (first song birds, parrots, loons, swifts, woodpeckers), first whale (Himalayacetus), earliest lagomorphs, armadillos, appearance of sirenian, proboscidean mammals in the fossil record. Flowering plants continue to diversify.
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).