Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links

[Nicholas]

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2009) — Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight – and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.

Find the article HERE!

Auspex, I really would like your input on this.

[PaleoRon]

They mention differences in dinosaur and bird lungs several times. Where are the dinosaur lungs that they have been studying? Did I miss a momentous discovery?

[Auspex]

...it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.

The "birds descended directly from dinos" idea has never held water.

Fundamentally, it was more the other way around.

[tracer]

The "birds descended directly from dinos" idea has never held water.

Fundamentally, it was more the other way around.

well, that makes sense if they were descending. wait...

anson, you need to code a filter that makes it where people can't post replies to stuff they don't understand at all. you could call it the "tracer blocker".

[ashcraft]

This is fundamental to bird physiology," said Devon Quick, an OSU instructor of zoology who completed this work as part of her doctoral studies. "It's really strange that no one realized this before. The position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their lung function, which in turn is what gives them enough lung capacity for flight."

I would strongly disagree with this statement. Flight had been achieved by birds already, this allowed for more vigorous flite. Mammals also can obviously fly, with lung capacity that is much lower then modern birds. I hope she mis-spoke, or is misquoted.

Brent Ashcraft

[trilo-biker]

ok I have a question though so are arphtopterexes (i know I misspelled that)actully not a link between dinos and birds but a early bird thats a link to a diffrent species or is it a dinosaur that turned out like a bird due to convergent evolution

[Auspex]

ok I have a question though so are arphtopterexes (i know I misspelled that)actully not a link between dinos and birds but a early bird thats a link to a diffrent species or is it a dinosaur that turned out like a bird due to convergent evolution

Archaeopteryx was an expression of certain genetic propensities, rendering it more birdlike than anything known to have come before, but ultimately leading nowhere. Those same propensities were expressed again and again; the basic architecture that finally persisted and lead to so much variation in the details arose in the Cretaceous and is today the most successful terrestrial vertebrate. The non-avian theropods were descended from some of the early near-bird "experiments" that wound up going a different direction.