dinosaur take on many dissimilar shape and sizes , but paleontologists are learning their success had nothing to do with their iconically massive body . If anything , their evolutionary success would appear to have come from their longstanding ability to keep shrinking . Just need the birds .
Top image : NebezialviaDeviant Art .
Shortly after the dinosaurs made their appearance some 220 million years ago , they rapidly evolved and spread out into many different forms . This mad dash to invade all viable ecological recess is what evolutionary biologists call adaptative radiation . Soon after this initial form , however , dinosaur evolution — at least as far as trunk size of it organic evolution goes — slowed down appreciably . Indeed , biologists have observed that rate of physical structure sizing phylogenesis slows down as lineages carry on to diversify .
Evolution is for the Birds
Well , except for one particular line of dinosaurs — one that ’s still around today , in the form of birds . allot to an external squad led by scientists at Oxford University and the Royal Ontario Museum , continually shrinking morphologies and persistent high rates of evolution may have helped the group that became birds to continue exploiting new ecological recess over the class of their evolutionary history . And this is what still allows them to be hugely successful even today .
To reach this conclusion , the scientists forecast the body volume of 426 dinosaur metal money , based on the heaviness of their leg ivory . They then probe the rate of trunk size phylogeny on dinosaur that existed during the first 160 million geezerhood of their beingness . Results showed that dinosaur body size of it develop very rapidly in the other daylight — and that this high rate of phylogeny persisted only for the feathered maniraptoran dinosaur filiation that pass to doll .
jumper lead researcher Roger Benson of Oxford University ’s Department of Earth Sciences had this to say in a disposed argument :
dinosaur are n’t extinct ; there are about 10,000 species alive today in the material body of bird . We want to understand the evolutionary link between this exceptional keep grouping , and their Mesozoic congeneric , including well - known extinct coinage like T. king , Triceratops , and Stegosaurus . We found especial body mass variation in the dinosaur line leading to birds , especially in the feathered dinosaurs called maniraptorans . These include Jurassic Park ’s Velociraptor , birds , and a huge cooking stove of other shape , librate anything from 15 gram to 3 metric ton , and use up kernel , plants , and more omnivorous diet .
Maintaining Evolutionary Potential
Small consistency sizing , says Benson , was the key to observe evolutionary potential in birds .
Image : Julius Csotonyi
His enquiry suggests that the evolutionary line that lead to bird — arguably the most successful line given that all the others are now extinct — kept experimenting with different , often radically smaller , body sizes . This enabled new bodily morphologies and adaptations to arise more pronto than among the more larger dinosaur . The other dinosaur groups that failed to do this got trapped in minute ecological niche that did n’t allow for this kind of diversity and tractability — and they ultimately went extinct .
translate the integral work at PLoS One : “ Rates of Dinosaur Body Mass Evolution Indicate 170 Million Years of Sustained Ecological Innovation on the Avian Stem Lineage . ”
BirdsdinosaursEvolutionPaleontologyScience
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