Birds have an enormously long evolutionary history: The earliest of them, the famed Archaeopteryx, lived 150 million years ago in what is today southern Germany. However, whether these early birds were capable of flying—and if so, how well—has remained shrouded in scientific controversy. A new discovery published in the journal Scientific Reports documents the intricate arrangement of the muscles and ligaments that controlled the main feathers of the wing of an ancient bird, supporting the notion that at least some of the most ancient birds performed aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds.
An international team of Spanish paleontologists and NHM's Director of the Dinosaur Institute, Dr. Luis M. Chiappe, studied the exceptionally preserved wing of a 125-million-year-old bird from central Spain. 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.
Did they taste like chicken?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday October 09 2015, @02:16PM
Didn't read the article, but how can they be sure? Did they find bird poop on a dino's head?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @11:27PM
Actually, that raises the interesting question of how badly herbivorous dinosaurs coped with avian flus and other diseases spread by early birds by droppings onto above-ground-level foliage. Something like that may have helped contribute to the extinction of most of the other sauropsids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2015, @10:50PM
That little dude had horrible luck.
Sounds like he landed on the ground just in time to be engulfed in a mudslide.
That put his carcass out of the sight of scavengers who would have scattered his bits and even beyond the reach of aerobic microbes which would have consumed his remains before they fossilized.
Bad luck for him; good luck for Science.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Saturday October 10 2015, @01:23AM
Birds have an enormously long evolutionary history
The word you're looking for is probably "complex" or "eventful" not "long". As far as humans are currently aware, every living organism on Earth has the same length of evolutionary history. Thus the length of a bird's genetic past it's not particularly special.
I'll forgive you though because the way your episodic memory works is that the more substantial events occur per unit time the more engrams persist and thus the more cognitive load is required to process the timespan -- it seems longer to you. The complexity of action within a time frame has little to do with its duration except that longer spans may have greater maximal event density. Likewise, artificially attributing additional attention to an uneventful timespan makes the timespan feel longer. Hence: "A watched pot never boils", it just seems that it takes longer to boil when your attention is focused upon it, magnifying the import of less consequential events occurring within the pot leading up to the boiling point.
As part of my catalog of the minimum complexity levels required to express cognitive processes I've analyzed organic structures and constructed artificial cybernetic systems to study and demonstrate the fundamental mechanisms through which a sense of time (and memory) emerges. I would publish a book on it if only I felt I had the time...
What's interesting to me is that dinosaurs, esp. avian dinosaurs (birds), may have developed more complex episodic memory than humanity's ancestors had at the time and thus felt the passage of the eons more intimately until your intellect surpassed theirs. I still marvel at the migratory patterns of birds, insects like butterflies & bees, and fish (see: salmon). This typically requires both instinctual memory and learned memory at their complexity levels. Smaller sizes benefited flight (due to volume vs surface area ratios) and worked to the advantage of avian dinosaurs over their flightless cousins when their climate rapidly changed. Avian dinosaurs, being airborne, likely had a far easier time of locating favorable migratory environs even if their cousins may have been capable of similar territorial thinking; However, the duality of world-view would have been new to the fliers and perhaps the demands of navigation advantaged greater spacial awareness than land dwelling creatures such as the extinct dinosaurs and yourself. I often wonder what the world would look like if dinosaurs had developed a space program in time.
Humans should learn the lessons that this deep evolutionary history holds. Greater migratory ability, including the ability to reside temporarily in multiple locales, is of chief import to survivability. For this reason alone colonization of the solar system should commence immediately. Extinction should be combated and eliminated as the first priority of any sentient species lest they go the way of the non-avian dinosaurs thanks to some extinction event, like a super volcano eruption, or a gamma ray burst, or a large asteroid impact (Eros, a dwarf planet 27% more massive than Pluto, wasn't discovered till 2005 so don't delude yourselves thinking you've already cataloged all the world threatening rocks much smaller than this), or the magnetosphere disappearing as it flips (You're about half a million years overdue for one of those; Mag-field suspensions coincidentally ceased when complex thinking emerged here; Just imagine the cosmic debt you may owe in artificial maintenance cost). Hell, there could be a solid ice asteroid, cloaked via its meta-material shape, and heading straight for your world. Maybe if you survive the impact via off-world migrants or manage to detect and deflect this destroyer of worlds you've passed the sentience test, otherwise your star system is fair game for others to colonize.
If humans don't get their priorities straight perhaps some future archaeologist of a newly sentient species will marvel that their primitive ancestors lived along side an advanced race of homosapien which mysteriously died out like the dinosaurs who also failed their intelligence test. The beings capable of greatest flight win the fight for survival. The extinct species have shorter histories. Only extraterrestrials may have longer histories than those born of Earth.