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Wings over Spain
Natural History, Sept, 1998 by Luis M. Chiappe
How bird flight originated is still a wide-open question, but proponents of the "trees down theory" (a hypothesis that holds that flight developed after an intermediate gliding stage) cannot be too pleased to learn that both Caudipteryx and Protoarchaeopteryx, while feathered, were flightless ground-dwelling runners. This fact does not close the argument, but it does lend support to the idea that flight arose from the ground up rather than from trees down.
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What do these discoveries ultimately mean? To me, it is a matter of perception. If we could travel back in time to the late Mesozoic, some animals would be familiar, others alien. But if we focused only on early birds and their close dinosaur relatives and compared them, we would find little outward difference between these avian and nonavian dinosaurs. This is what the fossils are telling us in the strongest statement yet: the dinosaurs are still among us in the form of the feathered bipeds we call birds.
Mark Norell is a curator and chairman of the Department of Verrtebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Vertebrate paleontologist Luis M. Chiappe is a research fellow and associate in the Department of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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