Birds<\/a>, Brusatte describes how he is working with an international team of researchers to explore such possibilities, adding that scientists are also looking for evidence from shared behaviour seen in modern animals.<\/p>\nThe approach might be something of a long shot. But it wouldn\u2019t be the first where birds and their ancestors are concerned: because while many dinosaurs were wiped out when a colossal asteroid struck Earth 66m years ago, one group survived.<\/p>\n
Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, with some bird skulls from his collection. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s totally percolated into the popular consciousness that birds are dinosaurs,\u201d said Brusatte. \u201cThey are real, true dinosaurs. This is not a turn of phrase.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Story of Birds swoops through the incredible journey of avian-kind, revealing how small cousins of Velociraptors eventually gave rise to the panoply of birdlife around us today.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like a T rex mutated into a chicken one day, and that\u2019s how you got a bird from a dinosaur,\u201d says Brusatte. \u201cIt was a long, gradual process of evolution through natural selection.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Brusatte notes, features including feathers and wings initially had nothing to do with flight.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just so happened that you had feathers that had probably originally evolved for insulation to keep these dinosaurs warm. They\u2019ve been modified into these display structures, these advertising billboards sticking off of the arms of some of these dinosaurs [as wings],\u201d he said, noting that without planning some dinosaurs became small enough, and had wings big enough, to gain a little lift and thrust.<\/p>\n
As Brusatte explains, some early birds had teeth, claws or long tails and there were likely many different approaches to getting lift-off. \u201cThere was a whole fantastic aviary of birds flapping and fluttering overhead of T rex and Triceratops until the asteroid hit,\u201d he said. \u201cAll of those birds then died. Except for the modern-style birds.\u201d<\/p>\n
These lucky survivors of the fifth mass extinction had, it seems, a good hand of cards. Not only were they strong flyers, but they grew rapidly from chick to adult, lived on the ground and waded in shallow water \u2013 a bonus given forests collapsed in the \u201cimpact winter\u201d that followed the disaster. What\u2019s more, they had toothless beaks that meant they could eat seeds \u2013 a food that remains in the soil even after trees, leaves and fruits are gone.<\/p>\n
But evolution soon gave rise to creatures every bit as fearsome as the dinosaurs that had perished. Among them were the terror birds \u2013 creatures that stalked South America for tens of millions of years, reaching up to 10 foot in height, with a head larger than a horse\u2019s skull, fearsome claws on each foot and a beak that was both hooked and razor sharp.<\/p>\n
Fossilised remains of an Archaeopteryx, the oldest fossil bird, which became crucial in the fight to establish the theory of evolution Photograph: Jason Edwards\/Getty Images\/National Geographic RF<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was basically T rex reincarnated, a top predator, really big, tiny little arms, ferocious head,\u201d said Brusatte.<\/p>\n
That birds today are every bit as much of a dinosaur as the land-shaking sauropods or stocky triceratops that once roamed the planet is not just borne out by fossils. It is also revealed in their DNA. As Brusatte notes, a six-day-old quail embryo has pelvis that looks just like the hips of a theropod like T rex. What\u2019s more, by tinkering with the genes of a chicken in an egg it is possible to trigger, albeit fatally for the chick, the development of teeth.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I look at these things and I see the photos of these genetic experiments, and I read the research papers, my mind is blown,\u201d says Brusatte.<\/p>\n
The Story of Birds is not short on charismatic creatures, from the 150m-year-old Archaeopteryx \u2013 the oldest fossil bird that became crucial in the fight to establish the theory of evolution \u2013 to the enormous \u201cDemon Ducks\u201d, whose eggs were eaten by the first Australian settlers, flightless birds like the doomed Dodo, and the hoatzin, a punky leaf-eating bird that lives in South America today and is constantly belching.<\/p>\n
But while Brusatte voices concern over the threats facing birds today \u2013 from avian flu to habitat loss, poisons, killer cats and glass buildings \u2013 he is upbeat.<\/p>\n
\u201cBirds are survivors. They are adaptable, they evolve quickly, they change quickly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they are confronted with a crisis, maybe not all of them make it through, but some of them do, and they can repopulate really quickly. That is the story of the asteroid. They were the only dinosaurs to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"T rex is often depicted as more brawn than brains, but now scientists are hoping to probe just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-551306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}