Evolutionary Biology

Evolutionary Biology: Birds and Dinosaurs

Introduction

Current scenarios suggest that we are living in exciting era of biology. Advance technologies have offered easier and cheaper data collection due to which researchers can easily synthesize previous life that exist on Earth. The focus of this paper would be on dinosaurs and birds. The discussion would be on Did Birds really Evolved from the Dinosaurs or there was something other factors contributed.

Discussion

The evolution of Birds is from a branch called Maniraptora i.e. bird like dinosaurs. From last hundred years this has been a debatable topic. The evidence of new fossil has reinforced this theory and today majority of the scientist has agreed on this concept as well (Padian, 1996). Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 suggested that there is strong connection between birds and dinosaurs. In order to prove this, he has highlighted certain similarities between Megalosaurus and Ostriches hindlimb which took at least a century (Losos, Arnold, Bejerano, Brodie, Hibbett, et al., 2013).

Evidence - Birds and Dinosaur Family

In this section, the discussion would on the evidence that birds belong from dinosaur family. Various reasons state that birds genetically associated to the dinosaurs. Here the concept of cladistics takes place i.e. branch of biology that bring together those organisms based on common features with other group, nevertheless, these organism features are not shared by any other animal. For example, mammals are grouped according to the feeding style and hairs and such common features differentiate one group from other groups (Timothy, 2006). This termed as synapomorphies. According to the Gauthier and Padian, Birds are theropod dinosaurs and the evidence of this has been provided in the study J. H. Ostrum of Yale University. Beside this, Ostrom's dinosaur-to-bird hypothesis was accepted and he highlighted 22 similarities that were only discovered in birds and ...