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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-on-birds-feathered-messengers-from-deep-time-168469>
"Scientists began to think in the 19th century that birds might have evolved
from dinosaurs, when the 150-million- year-old fossil skeleton of
Archaeopteryx — which we now know was capable of short bursts of active
flight — turned up in a German quarry.
The Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley observed the bony-tailed, feathered
fossil’s striking resemblance to small dinosaurs like
Compsognathus and
proposed that it was a transitional form between flightless reptiles and birds.
Huxley’s theory fell out of favour until the last decades of the 20th century,
when a new generation of palaeontologists returned to the similarities between
the metabolisms and bird-like structures of dinosaur fossils and birds, and
there is now a consensus that birds are avian dinosaurs. That the birds with
which we share our lives are the descendants of the hollow-tailed, meat-eating
theropods is a true wonder that never fails to thrill me.
Birds, like us, are survivors. They escaped the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg)
mass extinction event 65 million years ago: the fifth and last great dying in
the history of our planet, until the Sixth Extinction taking place around us
now."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
