Not all of the dinosaurian close relatives of birds could fly. Its fossil has preserved soft tissue with a bat-like wing membrane. Also, Yi qi was discovered in the last couple of years. Fossils like this suggest the intriguing possibility that birds evolved from a gliding ancestor that had effectively four wings. It’s the Late Jurassic where we start finding really interesting, distinctive, bird-like dinosaurs – especially with recent fossils from China preserved in fine-grain sediments from lake beds.Īnchiornis is a Late Jurassic winged dinosaur, with large feather arrays on its legs. Others closely related to birds, like Velociraptor, can be from the Late Cretaceous (100-66 million years ago), so they’d also had a lot of time to evolve independently. Archaeopteryx, discovered in 1861, was for a long time the only truly bird-like dinosaur – it’s from the Late Jurassic era (150 million years ago). Theropods are all bipedal and some of them share more bird-like features than others. If feathers evolved in dinosaurs, what is the origin of birds?īirds belong to the theropod group of dinosaurs that included T. It was found preserved in volcanic ash falls – a bit like Pompeii – captured curled up in a sleeping position very similar to how a lot of birds roost today. Rare fossils also give us glimpses of the behaviour of bird-like dinosaurs, such as Mei long, a small, duck-sized bipedal dinosaur from the Cretaceous era. Many dinosaurs had not just some kind of body covering, but distinctive bird-like feathers. The strong evidence doesn’t just come from fossilised bones and similarities found across the skeleton, but from fossilised soft tissue – especially feathers. There’s no longer really any doubt that birds are a type of dinosaur. He explains why ‘dinosaur’ is more ‘incredible bird’ than ‘terrible lizard’…Īre birds really dinosaurs? Is it disputed? Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford, Roger researches the evolution of dinosaurs – including bird origins – and large-scale evolutionary patterns. Such are the revelations from fossil discoveries in recent decades that are changing how we see birds today. Combined with short, muscular arms ending in a single giant claw for digging, Shuvuuia deserti (meaning ‘desert bird’) is not what you might classically expect from a dinosaur. Roger Benson’s latest paper features a feathered, chicken-sized, bird-like dinosaur revealed to have the hearing ability to rival a barn owl – a specialised nocturnal predator.
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