By Dr. Gareth Dyke, Gary Kaiser
Living Dinosaurs deals a picture of our present figuring out of the foundation and evolution of birds. After dozing for greater than a century, avian palaeontology has been woke up by way of startling new discoveries on virtually each continent. Controversies approximately even if dinosaurs had actual feathers or no matter if birds have been regarding dinosaurs were swept away and changed through new and more challenging questions: How outdated is the avian lineage? How did birds learn how to fly? Which birds survived the nice extinction that ended the Mesozoic period and the way did the avian genome evolve? solutions to those questions can assist us know the way the various varieties of residing birds are concerning each other and the way they advanced into their present niches. extra importantly, they might aid us comprehend what we have to do to assist them continue to exist the dramatic affects of human task in the world.
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Additional info for Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds
Example text
Clark JM, Norell MA, Chiappe LM. 1999. An oviraptorid skeleton from the Late Cretaceous of Ukhaa Tolgod, Mongolia, preserved in an avianl-like brooding position over an oviraptorid nest. American Museum Novitates 3265: 1–36. Clark JM, Norell M, Makovicky P. 2002. Cladistic approaches to the relationships of birds to other theropods. In Mesozoic Birds: Above the Heads of Dinosaurs, Chiappe LM, Witmer LD (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press; 31–61. Currie PJ, Chen PJ. 2001. Anatomy of Sinosauropteryx prima from Liaoning, northeastern China.
2005; GrelletTinner & Makovicky, 2006) have yielded crucial insights into the evolution of avian reproductive biology. , 2007) has demonstrated that many of them are not fully grown. Assuming their association with nests is demonstrative of a parental relationship, it suggests that nonavian theropods and perhaps even the earliest birds reached reproductive maturity before attaining somatic maturity (¼ cessation of growth). This pattern was reinforced by a paleohistologic study of four dinosaur taxa, in which reproductive maturity was established from the presence of bony tissues interpreted as medullary bone, which in some living birds serves as a calcium reserve for generating eggshell in gravid females (Lee & Werning, 2007).
In The Dinosauria, Weishampel DB, Dodson P, Osmolska H (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press; 660–671. Poe S. 1998. Sensitivity of phylogeny estimation to taxonomic sampling. Systematic Biology 47: 18–31. Perle A, Norell MA, Chiappe LM, Clark JM. 1993. Flightless Bird from the Cretaceous of Mongolia. Nature 362: 623–626. Prum RO. 2002. Why ornithologists should care about the theropod origin of birds: Auk 119: 1–17. Rauhut OWM. 2003. The interrelationships and evolution of basal theropod dinosaurs.