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from the I-don't-remember-this-in-the-film dept.
Abstract: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10336-014-1098-9
By re-examining a fossil of Scansoriopteryx (which means "climbing wing"), a sparrow-size creature from the Jurassic era, researchers believe that the commonly held belief that birds evolved from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs that gained the ability to fly is false. The birdlike fossil is actually not a dinosaur, as previously thought, but much rather the remains of a tiny tree-climbing animal that could glide.
Through their investigations, the researchers found a combination of plesiomorphic or ancestral non-dinosaurian traits along with highly derived features. It has numerous unambiguous birdlike features such as elongated forelimbs, wing and hind limb feathers, wing membranes in front of its elbow, half-moon shaped wrist-like bones, bird-like perching feet, a tail with short anterior vertebrae, and claws that make tree climbing possible. The researchers specifically note the primitive elongated feathers on the forelimbs and hind limbs. This suggests that Scansoriopteryx is a basal or ancestral form of early birds that had mastered the basic aerodynamic manoeuvres of parachuting or gliding from trees.
Their findings validate predictions first made in the early 1900's that the ancestors of birds were small, tree-dwelling archosaurs which enhanced their incipient ability to fly with feathers that enabled them to at least glide. This "trees down" view is in contrast with the "ground up" view embraced by many palaeontologists in recent decades that birds derived from terrestrial theropod dinosaurs.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ld a, b on Friday July 11 2014, @02:09PM
No guesswork needed. I still haven't read the article, but this fossil is either fake or misidentified.
There is no such thing as a non-dinosaurian archosaur that is the ancestor of birds because birds are used for the current definition of dinosauria. So any weird archosaur in between is by definition a dinosaur.
Leaving classification aside, dinosaurs including birds form a clear-cut group. The egg comes first. Pterosaurs are the closest archosaur group and they had reptile-like leathery eggs. All dinosaurs including birds have hard-shelled eggs sharing the exact same structure. The sex of a female T. Rex was identified because it shared the same bone structure modern female birds use to calcify eggs. Air sacs have been identified as basal saurischian traits as well. Then there are all the classical bone features which group them all up to the saurischia-ornithischia divide.
Birds had to branch off pretty early because they were a around from very early on. They can't be derived from the dinosaurs most people are familiar with. That much is true. The branch can be very early but it must include all of coleurosauria as they have been shown to have feathers while ornithischia were covered by scutes. You need to explain why a T. rex evolved from this birdo-saur monkey to end up looking mostly like a derived theropod.
If it looks like a dinosaur, walks like a dinosaur, breeds like a dinosaur, breathes like a dinosaur and quacks like a dinosaur...
10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.