Sentences with phrase «modern birds»

They were unable to launch themselves like modern birds, though, so how did these prehistoric giants get off the ground?

It may have even been the place where some animals that are important in today's ecosystems (such as modern birds and certain mammal groups) got their start.

Now, a new analysis of dozens of bones from modern birds and flying dinosaurs may have the answer.

The researchers think there may have been many experimental modes of dinosaur flight before the flight stroke used by modern birds appeared.

Human activities could change the pace of evolution, similar to what occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving modern birds as their only descendants.

The detailed family tree of modern birds has however confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how birds arrived at the spectacular biodiversity of more than 10,000 species is barely known.

Modern birds appeared to emerge in a snap of evolutionary time.

They had some unexpected features, some of which suggest clear links with modern birds while others are more puzzling.

At least some dinosaurs likely roosted together to sleep, quite possibly as a family, much like many modern birds do today.

His teams have also uncovered critical fossils indicating that the Antarctica maybe the center for the origin of modern bird groups and many examples of marine reptiles including a unique skeleton of a baby plesiosaur (2005).

Regularly spaced knobs on a fossil ulna of a Velociraptor, a 1 - to 2 - meter - long theropod, are similar to knobs housing secondary feathers on modern 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.

Archaeopteryx, a crow - sized dinosaur, had feathers nearly indistinguishable from modern bird feathers along its arms, legs, and tail.

The shape of the ancient bird's wing bones suggests it was capable of short bursts of active, flapping flight, similar to how modern birds like pheasants and quails fly to escape predators, a new study finds.

That's also true of certain modern birds: Some plover chicks can walk and feed themselves shortly after hatching, but take a little longer to fly.

One of the earliest birds, Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, spanning the evolutionary gap between modern birds and feathered dinosaurs.

Asara points out that his find does not mean chickens are the closest tyrannosaur relatives among modern birds, since he was able to compare the T. rex sequences only to species present in public protein databases.

Powder coatings are simply a type of paint that is applied to most modern bird cages.

Now, researchers reporting April 21 in Current Biology suggest that abrupt ecological changes following a meteor impact may have been more detrimental to carnivorous bird - like dinosaurs, and early modern birds with toothless beaks were able to survive on seeds when other food sources declined.

The late Cretaceous may have been a-flutter with birds and bird - like dinosaurs, but for some reason only modern birds made it through the asteroid strike that triggered a mass extinction 65 million years ago.

Meanwhile, the lineage of modern birds evolved «huge chest muscles and wings comprised of many different types of feathers layered over each other» — features essential to high - powered flight, Brusatte explains.

By studying the microscopic structure of the eggs, Dr. Varricchio and I were able to determine that the animal buried its eggs in a vegetation mound or nested in a humid environment - more like some reptiles than most open - nesting modern birds.

While Yulong mini and other oviraptorid dinosaurs resembled chickens and other modern birds and appear to have behaved somewhat like them, they were definitely non-avian dinosaurs and not birds.

Figuring out who is truly related to whom in modern bird families has been an ongoing problem, says Shannon Hackett.

4) I love the simple look of this tall modern bird bath.

With its birdlike wings, the dinosaur looks like a shoo - in capable of flight, but its skeleton lacks features — such as a bony, keeled sternum — that modern birds need to fly.

Consequently, modern birds stand apart from Mesozoic birds, and perhaps this contributed to their surviving the end - Cretaceous extinction event.»

A paper published in the journal Current Biology earlier this year looked at birdlike creatures living at the end of the Cretaceous and notes that the survivors — those species that went on to become modern birds — had beaks without teeth, ideal for seeds.

Theropod dinosaurs, the broader dinosaurian group that includes modern birds and other toothy relatives such as T. rex, also laid eggs in order to reproduce, and paleontologists have hypothesized that they may have had medullary bone as well.

Recently, Prum sat down with DISCOVER correspondent Veronique Greenwood to discuss what gives some birds their astonishing colors; how modern birds descended from dinosaurs; and the evolutionary importance of beauty and female choice.

«So wooing traces are a good explanation, especially when compared to modern bird traces.

The find means the branch on the tree of life that contains modern birds is now surrounded by animals with four wings, says Steve Salisbury of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, which suggests the four - wing condition may have been an important step in the origin of birds.

That discovery, combined with other fossil finds in North America that are related to chickens, turkeys, flamingos, and loons, among others, suggests that most major groups of modern birds originated and began to diversify before the K - T boundary.

Research in modern birds supports this idea, showing that a bigger brain aids survival in a novel environment.

Beyond the bones preserved in the fossil, the tiny wing of this ancient bird reveals details of a complex network of muscles that in modern birds controls the fine adjustments of the wing's main feathers, allowing birds to master the sky.

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.

Others challenged the findings, suggesting that the structures seen under the scope might be bacterial biofilms, and that the mass spectrometry results might reflect contamination with modern bird collagen.

The ancestors of modern birds seemed to have sophisticated hearing — and perhaps other sharp faculties, as well.

A new scenario about how flight evolved stems from work on modern birds running up inclines.

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.

The resemblance of the fan to the tails of modern birds suggests «it would be a reasonably good pitch and roll generator» in flight, says Michael Habib of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.

An ancient flying reptile may have had a feeding style akin to that of modern birds known as skimmers, which occasionally swoop along the water's surface to snatch fish swimming there, a new study suggests.

The fossils reveal the origins of the features that, tens of millions of years later, may have allowed modern birds to survive the Cretaceous extinction when other birds did not, Zhou and Wang say.

So how did modern birds come to rule the roost?

Furthermore, Archaeornithura had long legs and feet apparently adapted to wading in water, similar to those of today's plovers, suggesting that modern birds arose in aquatic habitats.