August 3, 2016 by Jon Tennant,
Plos Blogs
Over the last 20 years, there has
grown insurmountable evidence that birds are the direct
modern descendants of dinosaurs. Eagles are dinosaurs. Pigeons
are dinosaurs, annoyingly. Even penguins are weird, swimming dinosaurs.
The data supporting this
comes from a whole range of scientific domains, from the discovery of
thousands of feathered dinosaurs in
the fossil record to chemical and biological analysis of these fossils at a
molecular level. As science progresses in terms of technical capability, what
we can glean from the fossil record increases too, and we learn more about the
link between dinosaurs and birds.
A hugely advancing research field at
the moment is in embryonics and genetics. What does this have to do with
dinosaurs, you might ask (don't even think about mentioning Jurassic Park..)
Well, it's a good point. We don't have any dinosaur DNA, and we have very few
fossilised embryos. But wait! If modern birds are dinosaurs, then that means we
actually have a lot of dinosaur DNA and their embryos! This means we can start
asking a whole range of new questions about the evolution and origins of birds
from dinosaurs.
Recently, an international team
of researchers took on the task at looking at developmental links between
dinosaurs and modern birds. There is an old and quite controversial saying that
'ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny', which means that the growth or development
of an individual can be a reflection of the evolution that has occurred along
its lineage. Wouldn't it be cool if we could see that in birds and their
dinosaur ancestors?
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