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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.
Debates about the origin of bird flight are almost as old as the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which arose soon after the discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1862. Two theories have dominated most of the discussion since then: the cursorial ("from the ground up") theory proposes that birds evolved from small, fast predators that ran on the ...
Archaeopteryx (/ ˌ ɑːr k iː ˈ ɒ p t ər ɪ k s /; lit. ' old-wing '), sometimes referred to by its German name, "Urvogel" (lit. Primeval Bird) is a genus of bird-like dinosaurs.The name derives from the ancient Greek ἀρχαῖος (archaīos), meaning "ancient", and πτέρυξ (ptéryx), meaning "feather" or "wing".
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.
These features make Archaeopteryx a clear candidate for a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds, [15] making it important in the study both of dinosaurs and of the origin of birds. The first complete specimen was announced in 1861, and ten more Archaeopteryx fossils have been found since then. Most of the eleven known fossils include ...
Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs, and are part of the dinosaur lineage - indeed, the sole survivors from that lineage of a mass extinction 66 million years ago caused by an asteroid ...
The fossil filled a 70-million-year gap in the understanding of how the brains of birds evolved: between the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird-like dinosaur, and birds ...
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]