Research by post-doctoral fellow Alexander Dececchi challenges long-held hypotheses about how flight first developed in birds. Furthermore, his findings raise the question of why certain species developed wings long before ...
Evolution
Jul 18, 2016
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11
When they're not being the stars of various animated movies, penguins are playing an important role in evolutionary studies. Penguins are unique among modern birds in that they 'fly' through the water. Although flightless ...
Archaeology
Aug 27, 2015
3
49
Fossils of the oldest member of the lineage to which today's birds belong has been found in Hebei province of Northern China. The discovery pushes back the evolutionary record for birds by nearly 6m years and challenges the ...
Archaeology
May 7, 2015
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50
The most ambitious genetic study ever undertaken on bird evolution has found that almost all modern birds diversified after the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago.
Archaeology
Dec 11, 2014
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3
An international team of scientists has completed the largest whole genome study of a single class of animals to date. To map the tree of life for birds, the team sequenced, assembled and compared full genomes of 48 bird ...
Biotechnology
Dec 11, 2014
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0
In a recent paper describing ten new specimens of Yanornis martini identified by the director of the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Natural History Mr. Xiaoting Zheng, an international team of scientists lead by Dr. Jingmai O'Connor ...
Archaeology
Apr 18, 2014
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0
The magpie-sized Archaeopteryx had bird and dinosaur features and helped show that birds evolved from dinosaurs. However, recent research in the journal Nature questions its position in the dinosaur-bird family tree.
Archaeology
Sep 15, 2011
1
0
The earliest known bird, the magpie-sized Archaeopteryx, had a similar hearing range to the modern emu, which suggests that the 145 million-year-old creature — despite its reptilian teeth and long tail — was more birdlike ...
Archaeology
Jan 14, 2009
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0
You might think dating dinosaurs would be an easy task, but in reality it's actually quite difficult. We date dinosaurs based on where we find their fossils, using the ages of the rocks that they're found in. This means that ...
Archaeology
Nov 14, 2016
1
67
Over the last 20 years, there has grown insurmountable evidence that birds are the direct modern descendants of dinosaurs. Eagles are dinosaurs. Pigeons are dinosaurs, annoyingly. Even penguins are weird, swimming dinosaurs.
Evolution
Aug 3, 2016
0
8
