A crucial part of a bird’s flying apparatus is the furcular, or wishbone, which helps to provide some spring-effect to the down-stroke of a birds wing. The question had long been how and when did the furcular evolve? It wasn’t until John Ostrom in the mid 1960’s that it was realised that the wishbone is…
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After evolving the capacity for powered flight early in the Eocene, bats rapidly dispersed around the world and are found on most continents. Where they were suspiciously absent in this ancient disposal as mainland Asia. A report out today in the journal Biology Letter announces that gap has been bridged by the finding of two…
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A new short-faced archosauriform from Arizona, USA, was described in the journal The Science In Nature this week. Archosauriforms are a group of diapsid reptiles that first appeared in the Late Permian and includes crocodiles, pterosaurs, dinosaurs and birds as well as the crocodile-like proterosuchids. This new species probably belongs within the crocodiles and comes from the upper Triassic, around 219 million years ago.…
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One of the confusing problems of understanding the evolutionary origin of birds is the fact that all the bones in a bird skull are fused together. This makes it difficult to identify individual bones and work out how they relate to other creatures. That’s why the announcement in Nature today so important. In it a…
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News today of new species of beetle trapped in the dung of an early dinosaur. Beetles (Coleoptera) are the most diverse group of organisms in the world today and they have their origins back to the Permian period but the Triassic period appears to be when the incredible diversification of beetles began. But when palaeontologists…
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