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Archaeopteryx Knocked From Roost as Original Bird?
by Danielle Venton
Archaeopteryx‘s status as the forerunner of modern birds is crumbling in the face of a new, closely-related fossil. The new discovery, a feathered, chicken-sized dinosaur named Xiaotingia, has prompted a fresh look at the dinosaur family tree, casting Archaeopteryx as a bird-like dinosaur rather than dinosaur-like bird. Archaeopteryx has been fundamental to our understanding of birds’ origins but, if confirmed, this finding questions those assumptions.
“This result challenges the centrality of Archaeopteryx in the transition to birds,” write paleontologists led by Xing Xu in a July 28 Nature study.

(photo: Xiaotingia skeleton. Xu et al./Nature)
Since its initial discovery 150 years ago, Archaeopteryx, meaning “ancient wing,” has been a famed fossil. The 150 million-year-old creature had many bird-like aspects, including its modern feathers, wings, wishbone and cranial structure, as well as traits shared with dinosaurs, such as a long bony tail, teeth and claws on the front limbs.
Quite appropriately, the first specimenwas unearthed shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx became a textbook example of a transitional fossil and a focus of ongoing debates over evolution, with some anti-evolutionists denying the creature’s transitional nature and even doubting the fossils’ authenticity…
(read more: Wired Science) (illustration by Xing Lida and Liu Yi)

Archaeopteryx Knocked From Roost as Original Bird?

by Danielle Venton

Archaeopteryx‘s status as the forerunner of modern birds is crumbling in the face of a new, closely-related fossil. The new discovery, a feathered, chicken-sized dinosaur named Xiaotingia, has prompted a fresh look at the dinosaur family tree, casting Archaeopteryx as a bird-like dinosaur rather than dinosaur-like bird. Archaeopteryx has been fundamental to our understanding of birds’ origins but, if confirmed, this finding questions those assumptions.

“This result challenges the centrality of Archaeopteryx in the transition to birds,” write paleontologists led by Xing Xu in a July 28 Nature study.

(photo: Xiaotingia skeleton. Xu et al./Nature)

Since its initial discovery 150 years ago, Archaeopteryx, meaning “ancient wing,” has been a famed fossil. The 150 million-year-old creature had many bird-like aspects, including its modern feathers, wings, wishbone and cranial structure, as well as traits shared with dinosaurs, such as a long bony tail, teeth and claws on the front limbs.

Quite appropriately, the first specimenwas unearthed shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx became a textbook example of a transitional fossil and a focus of ongoing debates over evolution, with some anti-evolutionists denying the creature’s transitional nature and even doubting the fossils’ authenticity…

(read more: Wired Science) (illustration by Xing Lida and Liu Yi)