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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.
They argue that people feel the simple companionship of birds, are inspired by them to create art, let them mark the seasons and provide a sense of place, and use them "as symbols of joy and love". [59] A former statesman, Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, was able to express his feeling for birds in his 1927 book The Charm of Birds. [60]
According to some estimates, modern birds (Neornithes) evolved in the Late Cretaceous or between the Early and Late Cretaceous (100 Ma) and diversified dramatically around the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, which killed off the pterosaurs and all non-ornithuran dinosaurs. [7] [8]
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 evolutionary origin of birds was an open question in paleontology for over a century, but the modern scientific consensus is that birds evolved from small feathered theropods in the Jurassic. Not all dinosaur lineages were cut short at the end of the Cretaceous during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event , and over 11,000 species 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 ...
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 ...
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).