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November
4, 2002
Science
Specialist Ed Yeates reporting
Scientists believing birds are descended from dinosaurs may
have to "eat crow."
A small coalition of researchers is challenging the conventional
theory. They now believe many prehistoric creatures thought
to be dinosaurs were actually birds, evolving on their own
separate tree.
Not only
do they believe in the separate tree, but they've got a fossil
now to prove it. The Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah has
made a model based on remnants of the bird which was unearthed
in China.
You wouldn't
want to meet this creature on a dark night - not even in daylight.
It's a model based a newly discovered fossil of a dromaeosaur
- which instead of being grounded - could actually fly!
Scientists claim most of these fossils, discovered in China,
are too primitive to be birds - still contending dinosaurs
are the ancestors of birds.
But Stephen Czerkas who directs the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding,
Utah, says it's the other way around. Many dinosaurs weren't
dinosaurs at all, but birds to begin with.
"Essentially,
it reveals one of the biggest mistakes that has ever been
made in paleontology," Czerkas says.
In fact Czerkas, along with a small but a growing group of
followers, says these raptors portrayed so vividly in movies
like Jurassic Park were not dinosaurs, but flightless birds
- like ostriches - evolving on their own separate tree.
This new discovery of a flying dromaeosaur is pretty convincing.
It had evidence of feathers here - and again on the tail.
"That's what we finally found. A specimen where the feathers
are so well preserved, there's no doubt as to what they actually
present," Czerkas says.
With Czerkas' model filling in the gaps, dromaeosaur here
is very much a flying creature.
"Not just the body is covered with feathers, but the
arms are more than arms. They're actually wings," he
says.
The killer claw here, which the Velocoraptor had, is also
a perching claw birds used to grab and climb. And it's tail
- with feathers.
"The primitive nature of birds, when you get into the
very earliest forms, is that they do still retain the long
tail," Czerkas says.
While this crow-sized dromaeosaur is only 130 million years
old, Czerkas says it's ancestor - also a bird - probably predates
the dinosaurs.
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