“Birdie birdie in the sky
Why do you do that in my eye
I will not laugh I will not cry
I’m just glad that cows don’t fly!”
(Photo/Archaeopteryx Live Science Staff)
Good Day World!
Are you a bird lover?
Even if you’re not, you may find the following brief history of birds entertaining.
And then there were birds…
The evolution of birds is thought to have begun in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from a clade of theropoda dinosaurs named Paraves. Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves.
The earliest known isArchaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period, though Archaeopteryx is not commonly considered to have been a true bird.
The raven-sized animal in the photo above lived about 150 million years ago and had feathers identical to that of modern flying birds. But Archaeopteryx also had sharp teeth, a long bony tail and clawed fingers.
At 7 feet long and 3 feet tall, Beipiaosaurus is one of the largest known feathered theropods the group of swift upright dinosaurs from birds are thought to be descended.
(Photo/Beipiaosaurus Live Science Staff)
Like Archaeopteryx, Microraptor was about the size of a crow and had teeth, claws and feathers on all four limbs that it may have used to glide between trees.
(Photo/Microraptor by Julius T. Csotonyi)
As of the mid-2000s, new fossil and molecular data provide an increasingly clear picture of the evolution of modern bird orders, and their relationships.
A 2008 study published in Science examined DNA sequences from 169 species of birds that represented all of the major extant groups. The findings may necessitate a wholesale restructuring of the avian phylogenetic tree.
Time for me to walk on down the road…
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