When I was a kid, I learned about Dinosaur being “giant lizard”, and it’s been may-be 10 years, that I hear “Birds are dinosaurs”.

I am curious on how the concept evolve, both among paleontologists, and among the general public.

  • Kelly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    5 months ago

    The idea is quite old:

    Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He compared the skeletal structure of Compsognathus, a small theropod dinosaur, and the “first bird” Archaeopteryx lithographica (both of which were found in the Upper Jurassic Bavarian limestone of Solnhofen). He showed that, apart from its hands and feathers, Archaeopteryx was quite similar to Compsognathus.

    But having fossil evidence is quite young:

    One of the earliest discoveries of possible feather impressions by non-avian dinosaurs is a trace fossil (Fulicopus lyellii) of the 195–199 million year old Portland Formation in the northeastern United States. Gierlinski (1996, 1997, 1998) and Kundrát (2004) have interpreted traces between two footprints in this fossil as feather impressions from the belly of a squatting dilophosaurid.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur

    • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
      43·
      5 months ago

      It’s too bad T.H. Huxley was such a racist POS. He was a great paleontologist and I like his style of agnosticism.