#bird evolution

Out now in the Journal of Avian Biology! Pyle et al. 2024 discusses the evolutionary history of bird molt, and I was asked to illustrate this whole family tree in terms of molt strategies. I'm so pleased to have put this all together for the authors! This is a fairly technical topic and so I know how valuable it is to have an image to go along with it!

Archaeopteryx ("Ancient Wing") was a small dinosaur that lived in what is now Germany during the late Jurassic period (150.8-148.5 Mya). Archaeopteryx was the earliest member of the Avialae that we know of. The first known bird.

It's a common misconception that birds only came about after the dinosaurs were wiped out, but in fact, birds are much older than most people think. Birds evolved alongside the non-avian dinosaurs for almost 90 million years before the asteroid impact.

Missing link? A newly-discovered fossil looks like the halfway point between birds and dinosaurs

Cratonavis zhui is a "bird" with T. rex-like skull — and it tells us a lot about avian evolution from dinosaurs

A recently discovered bird with a T. rex-like skull was unearthed in China — epitomizing, in one bizarre fossil, a visual representation of the long, strange evolution from dinosaurs to birds.

Called Cratonavis zhui, the strange hybrid died some 150 million years ago and was uncovered by paleontologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Cratonavis most likely behaved like a raptor, flitting from tree to tree and pouncing on prey with its sharp claws. It's a remarkable find that illustrates mosaic evolution, or the slow transition of some traits while others remain the same.

The evolutionary history of birds is nothing short of spectacular. The diversity of feathers, beaks, claws, diet and preferred geography is broad, not to mention the ability to majestically fly better than any other animal. But the differences between birds and dinosaurs are substantial, and experts still aren't entirely sure how this transition happened...

I know their lungs would obviously have to have some shifting going on. And from what we can tell, the beaks also was another change over time

It is probably hard to a hundred percent tell because of not having all the organs. but still, with the knowledge we know, what some of these organs may have been like off of skeletal shapes

but yeah, just different adaptations from around the start of the transition into non avian to avian dinosaurs (with the oldest known fossils)

well, for one, the fact that they have legs directly underneath their bodies. that's just dinosaur legs.

they also have four toes, which, theropod dinosaurs also only had four toes - the fourth one was often off the ground, which many living birds share today, having three toes on the ground. Those toes end in claws in most birds, just like in their nonavian ancestors.

Feathers themselves are a dinosaur trait. Well, an Ornithodira trait. But they were common in dinosaurs. Same with warmbloodedness.

Saurischia is where we see the evolution of the avian lung system.

We see the gradual reduction of the hand into the bird hand from the start of Theropoda through to Euornithes

Beaks evolved multiple times in multiple clades. The beak that is homologous with bird beaks started in Euornithes - so, excluding opposite birds/Enantiornithines.

the complex vocal organs seem to be a dinosaur thing based on that ankylosaur larynx specimen

wins start showing up in maniraptoriformes and are fully formed by paraves, so Gallimimus and Deinocheirus had baby wings and Velociraptor had full wings

Flight shows up in Paraves

My full reworking of Wikipedia's Palaelodidae articles. This includes the genera Palaelodus, Megapaloelodus and Adelalopus as well as the family article that encompasses them all.

The reason for this mini-project is kinda funny. For some reason I don't remember I ended up realizing how the list of fossil flamingos on the main flamingo article was rather lacklustre and primarily redlinks, so I did all fossil flamingos I could find. And after that I went deeper down and did palaelodids, straight billed flamingos.

Obviously the individual articles vary in quality. Adelalopus is the worst one easily, there is only one paper really focusing on it and the remains aren't overly unique or interesting, nor are their implications besides clarifying the groups origin a little.

Megapaloelodus is more extensive, partially due to the large number of named species which I ended up trying to sort into a neat little list that clarifies where they all come from in a way that should be easier to read than originally. Sadly tho the genus is incredibly fragmentary so again, lacking a lot of fun stuff.

Palaelodus was the second one of the batch I did and arguably one of the best ones. It's well described, has a good chunk of literature under its belt, a lot of discussion given their behavior, diet, ecology in general and locomotion and its the only genus that has actual image material on Wikimedia (aided by the fact that after I finished Dimitry Bogdanov uploaded a live reconstruction). I'm pretty happy with it. If you wanna read more on this guy and don't feel like going to wikipedia, I wrote a post summarizing my edits on here as well.

Palaelodidae then is pretty much a no brainer. It was my first family-level article but since I had written about all three genera already it was really just a best-off. A basic summary of all the three prior pages. I ended up making a table for the genera here instead of just listing them since that allowed me to make easier subdivisions for the individual species. I used the list system later down for the range across the continents. The sources are largely a combination of the prior three (duh) with some minor additions mostly regarding indetermined remains that don't fit neatly into the names taxa.