Interesting stuff from a news feed - Question: Are dinosaurs extinct? Answer: Dinosaurs are very much still alive, and are more successful and numerous in terms of species numbers now than they have been at any other point in their roughly-230-million-year history. This is because birds are dinosaurs; they evolved from within the speedy, bipedal group of predators called theropods, which includes such creatures as Velociraptor and T. rex. Birds are not only the descendants of the dinosaurs – they actually are living dinosaurs. They are simply a small, specialised flying form of theropod. Right now there are nearly ten thousand known living species, and perhaps as many as four hundred billion individuals flitting about on the planet.Since the first dinosaur fossil with feathers was discovered in China in 1996, around 40 species have been found with feather impressions or direct evidence of feathers of some kind. This has shown us that feathers existed in dinosaurs long before they had any purpose in flight.Feathers are so entwined in our minds with flight, this seems counter-intuitive, but flight feathers are highly specialised structures and cant have appeared fully formed. We now know feathers had an entirely different purpose initially. The earliest feathers we see on dinosaur fossils are simple, fluffy filaments, like the down of a chick, and they were used for insulation. Only later were feathers co-opted for display purposes and eventually for flight. used to be easy to define birds. They fly, lay eggs, are bipedal and warm-blooded; and have feathers, beaks, and wishbones. The problem is that we now know that most of these once-defining features evolved in their dinosaur ancestors. So what is a bird? In some ways, the distinction between birds and dinosaurs is arbitrary. Powered flight – rather than gliding – is the remaining thing that separate Archaeopteryx, the first bird, from its dinosaur relatives. But it may be only a matter of time until we find dinosaurs capable of powered flight as well. Response by John Pickrell, author of Flying Dinosaurs: How fearsome reptiles became birds (flyingdinosaurs.net), and editor of Australian Geographic. Brought to you by the Fuzzy Logic Science Show, 1130am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@Zoho
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:28:30 +0000
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