Sentences with phrase «ancestors of modern birds»

The dinosaur Archaeopteryx is widely regarded as one of the earliest ancestors of modern birds, but the question of whether or not it could actively fly has been debated for decades.
In the past few years, a number of paleontologists have reported skeletonal evidence that saurians were warm blooded, nurturing, and the probable ancestors of modern birds.
The results suggest that the last common ancestor of all modern birds — in other words, the species at the base of the evolutionary family tree that includes all living bird species — lived in West Gondwana, a landmass that included what are now fragments of South America and large portions of Antarctica, about 95 million years ago.
Discuss how the Archaeopteryx was, indeed, likely the oldest ancestor of modern birds — while the Pterosaur was not.
Since then, more four - winged dinosaurs have been found, but doubt remained about whether they were direct ancestors of modern birds, or just an unusual group of dinobirds that later died out.
«Larry Martin, a paleontologist from the University of Kansas, said clearly in 1985 that the archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of any modern birds; instead, it's a member of a totally extinct group of birds.»»
Truthfollower: «Larry Martin, a paleontologist from the University of Kansas, said clearly in 1985 that the archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of any modern birds; instead, it's a member of a totally extinct group of birds.»»
The ancestors of modern birds seemed to have sophisticated hearing — and perhaps other sharp faculties, as well.
The ancestors of all modern birds, from the hummingbird to the majestic bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus, seen here as a young adult), lived on a supercontinent in the Southern Hemisphere about 95 million years ago, a new study suggests.
That's especially mysterious because Enantiornithines were exceptionally abundant (they apparently outnumbered the ancestors of modern birds before the asteroid struck) and had presumably played the same ecological roles as the ancestors of modern birds, which survived the mass extinctions.
Hosts infected by viruses found new uses for the genetic material the agents of disease left behind; metabolic enzymes somehow came to refract light rays through the eye's lens; mammals took advantage of the sutures between the skull bones to help their young pass through the birth canal; and, in the signature example, feathers appeared in fossils before the ancestors of modern birds took to the skies.
To Norell, it's important to read these as feathers all over the body because the major thrust of his work as a scientist is to show that dinosaurs are direct ancestors of modern birds.
One day the most famous flying dinosaur — Archaeopteryx — is a direct ancestor of all modern birds; the next day it belongs to a different dinosaur group, suggesting that feathered flight evolved twice.
Here's what we know about the evolution of flight: By about 150 million years ago, the forests were filled with flying — or perhaps just gliding — dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx, possibly similar to the ancestor of modern birds.
Other studies in Science describe convergent brain regions and gene expression for avian song learning and human speech, the singing activated genome in songbirds, complex evolutionary trajectories of avian sex chromosomes, a single loss of teeth in the ancestor of modern birds, the genomes of their closest extant outgroup (crocodilians) and inferred dinosaur ancestor, and computational methods developed for large - scale genomic analyses.
belonged to a group of birds known as «opposite birds» — creatures that lived along with the ancestors of modern birds.
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