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Dinosaurs, Ornithologists and Paleontology

Controversy exists in the professional paleontology community over the origin and fate of dinosaurs, as well as over the status, if any, of their lineal descendants in the animal kingdom. Ornithologists have also entered the debate in recent years, for the reason that, in 1973 a paleontologist who had researched the bones of the Archaeopteryx lithographica, which had been discovered in Germany in 1861 and which at 150 million years old was considered the first evolved bird, revived an idea first proposed by Thomas Huxley in 1868 that the animal "had inherited many of its features directly from a small meat-eating dinosaur" (Martin, 1998). In other words, long-extinct dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds. One view, indeed, is that dinosaurs never went extinct at all but through the process of evolution merely became reconfigured as birds, specifically a omnivorous variety of the theropod dinosaur. Many ornithologists "bristle" at the idea (Chang, 1998) and insist on the distinction between species.

What has lent strength to the paleontologists' perspective in recent years is the accretion of fossil evidence showing the imprint of feather or featherlike structures. Almost all of the recent evidence appears to have been found in Liaoning Province, China (Chang, 1998; Norell, 2001). One effect of the findings in the field--and of the scientifica debate accompanying them--is that the discipline of cladistics, which is "a method . . . to rank and group organisms according to characteristics, shared with a common ancestor" (Chang, 1998). The ranking and grouping are depicted graphically on a cladogram, which is basically a family tree of animals. However, Chang says that in the case of the dinosaur-bird connection, the cladogram "doesn't show birds' direct ancestry, but rather how wing traits evolved in dino-birds at different times." Chang describes seven body types among dino-birds, also called protobirds, and/or dinosaurs with birdlike...

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Dinosaurs, Ornithologists and Paleontology. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:21, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681753.html