Sentences with phrase «helps modern birds»
The feather shares characteristics with the plumage that helps modern birds fly, such as longer barbs on one side of the feather's shaft than the other.
https://www.sciencenews.org/ Not exact matches
A fossil from the ancient Aurornis xui (left) shows that the bird was the size of a modern - day chicken (right) and could help explain the evolution of birds.
These tiny structures helped birds to conquer the air, they're the ones that cover the bodies of most modern birds, and they too are found in the Cretaceous amber.
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.
Dr Sam Cobb, Senior Lecturer in Anatomyat the University of York and project lead, said: «Our results are important because they may help us identify one of the driving factors behind the outstanding diversity of bird species we see in the modern world.»
Archaeopteryx is fittingly similar to the monster as it is a bird - like dinosaur with feathers whose discovery by archaeologists in 1861 helped provide a link between reptiles and modern birds.