Latest Archaeopteryx Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new discovery made by paleontologists digging in China has put Archaeopteryx back on the map as one of the earliest birds. Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861 and, at the time, was professed to be the world's earliest bird. However, in 2011 researchers carried out a phylogenetic analysis and determined that the Archaeopteryx was actually just another feathered dinosaur. If this team was right, it would mean flight evolved...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A recently discovered dinosaur fossil believed to pre-date those from which birds were believed to have evolved could drastically change current theories on the origins of flight, according to a new UK study. According to BBC News, the fossil comes from a feathered-but-flightless dinosaur that was less than a foot in length and lived approximately 140 million years ago. The creature, which has been dubbed the Eosinopteryx, would...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online More evidence has emerged, published in the journal Current Biology, claiming birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. The prehistoric Archaeopteryx and bird-like dinosaurs before them had a more primitive version of a wing, according to the recent findings. Scientists are piecing together how the wing evolved, lending to evidence that gliding dinosaurs spent much of their days in the trees. "Before, it seemed that we had more...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An unusually complete fossil unearthed in Bavarian Germany was found to depict the tragic last moments of a prehistoric horseshoe crab as it stumbled for its life over 150 million years ago. The crab’s fossilized track, which is over 31 feet in length, displays both the beginning and end of its death march that was the result of the arthropod falling into a stagnant lagoon, according to a recent report published in the journal...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the most complete dinosaur fossils ever discovered suggests that feathered dinosaurs were more prevalent than previously thought and could have been the norm, not the exception. The 150 million-year-old fossil found in northern Bavaria shows that the dinosaur had down-like feathers over parts of its front and back as well on its tail. Scientists dubbed the creature Sciurumimus albersdoerferi after "Scirius”, the scientific...

[ Watch the Video ] An international team of researchers led by Brown University has shed some new light on whether the winged dinosaur Archaeopteryx could fly. The team has determined that a well-preserved feather on the raven-sized dinosaur's wing was black, which is evidence that the feathers had traits that could help Archaeopteryx fly. Also, the researchers determined that the fossilized feather's structure is identical to living birds, according to the research published in the...

New research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies has revealed how dinosaurs like Velociraptor and Deinonychus used their famous killer claws, leading to a new hypothesis on the evolution of flight in birds. In a paper published Dec. 14 in PLoS ONE, MSU researchers Denver W. Fowler, Elizabeth A. Freedman, John B. Scannella and Robert E. Kambic (now at Brown University in Rhode Island), describe how comparing modern birds of prey helped develop a new behavior model for...

Five days after the Twin Towers collapsed, two geoscientists boarded a plane from Denver to New York City. They were part of a team that would use remote sensing techniques to categorize the hazards that might affect the rescue workers, civilians and survivors of the terrorist attacks. One of their immediate tasks involved identifying long-burning fires under the rubble. A second was to create a compositional profile of the debris cloud that resulted from the devastation. Part of the project...

Archaeopteryx, once believed to be the world's earliest bird, may actually have been just another feathered dinosaur, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.Researchers in China, led by Xing Xu of Linyi University, carried out a phylogenetic analysis combining a newly discovered fossil with other similar dinosaurs and early birds, and concluded that the species should no longer be considered a fully developed bird.If confirmed, the controversial hypothesis would be a...

Pterosaurs, flying reptiles from the time of the dinosaurs, were not driven to extinction by the birds, but in fact they continued to diversify and innovate for millions of years afterwards. A new study by Katy Prentice, done as part of her undergraduate degree (MSci in Palaeontology and Evolution) at the University of Bristol, shows that the pterosaurs evolved in a most unusual way, becoming more and more specialized through their 160 million years on Earth. The work is published July 6 in...