A remarkable fossil record of the dinosaurs that led to birds reveals how evolution produces entirely new kinds of organisms.
At about six o'clock in the morning, long before light broke on a cold November day in 2014, I pushed through the Beijing station and fought my way onto a crowded train. I was headed for Jinzhou, a Chicago-sized city in the northeastern fringes of China. I tried to steal back some sleep as we crawled past concrete factories and hazy cornfields, but I was too excited to nod off.
The implications of these fossils are momentous. Ever since Charles Darwin, scientists have wondered how evolution produces radically new groups of animals. Does it happen rapidly, the accident of some freak mutation that can turn a land-bound creature into a master of the skies? Or are these new groups forged more slowly, as organisms adapt to changing environments over millions of years? Zhenyuanlong and the other fossils from Liaoning and elsewhere are starting to provide an answer.
Ostrom waited. He kept looking for the holy grail that would prove beyond any doubt the connection between birds and dinosaurs: dinosaur skeletons preserved in the type of exquisite detail needed to document feathers. Then, in 1996, as his career was drawing to a close, Ostrom was at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in New York City when Philip Currie, now at the University of Alberta, approached him.
There are now so many feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning and elsewhere that, taken together, they provide the best glimpse at a major evolutionary transition in the fossil record.
Why did these dinosaurs convert their fuzz into wings? The intuitive answer is flight: the maniraptorans were turning their bodies into airplanes, and the wings evolved to become the airfoils that generate lift. But a closer look at the fossil evidence suggests otherwise.
Long, straight legs and feet with three skinny main toes—hallmarks of the modern bird silhouette—first appeared more than 230 million years ago in the most primitive dinosaurs. Their emergence seems to be part of an overall reshaping of dinosaur bodies into upright-walking, fast-running machines that could outpace and outhunt their rivals. These hind-limb features are some of the defining characteristics of all dinosaurs, the very things that helped them rule the world for so long.
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