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Review
.2025 Jan;21(1):20240500.
doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2024.0500. Epub 2025 Jan 22.

Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents

Affiliations
Review

Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents

Daniel J Field et al. Biol Lett.2025 Jan.

Abstract

Among the most revolutionary insights emerging from 200 years of research on dinosaurs is that the clade Dinosauria is represented by approximately 11 000 living species of birds. Although the origin of birds among dinosaurs has been reviewed extensively, recent years have witnessed tremendous progress in our understanding of the deep evolutionary origins of numerous distinctive avian anatomical systems. These advances have been enabled by exciting new fossil discoveries, leading to an ever-expanding phylogenetic framework with which to pinpoint the origins of characteristic avian features. The present review focuses on four notable avian systems whose Mesozoic evolutionary history has been greatly clarified by recent discoveries: brain, kinetic palate, pectoral girdle and postcranial skeletal pneumaticity.

Keywords: bird evolution; brain evolution; dinosaur evolution; flight apparatus; palate; skeletal pneumaticity.

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Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

Evolution of the avian central nervous system and bony palate
Figure 1.
Evolution of the avian central nervous system and bony palate. (a)Navaornis (starred) illustrates avialan brain and inner ear morphology in an enantiornithine; however, endocranial morphology of non-neornithine avialans phylogenetically stemward and crownward of Enantiornithes remains poorly known. (b) Left: paravian skulls in ventral view (modified from [–38]) with palate osteology highlighted. Light blue ectopterygoids reflect uncertain presence in Enantiornithes. Stars next to the skulls of Ichthyornithes andBurhinus correspond to the enlarged palates illustrated to the right of the phylogeny. Right: morphological comparison of the pterygoid–palatine complex in an immature neognath (Burhinus capensis; above) and Ichthyornithes (below; composite reconstruction ofJanavis andIchthyornis, modified from [37] and [39]).
Evolution of the avian pectoral girdle and postcranial skeletal pneumaticity
Figure 2.
Evolution of the avian pectoral girdle and PSP. (a) Top: articulated paravian pectoral girdles in ventral view. Bottom: close-up of the glenoid region of the shoulder joint. Scapula and coracoid are fused into a scapulocoracoid in adult Troodontidae,Archaeopteryx andConfuciusornis, and unfused in Ornithothoraces (except ratites). Arrows between coracoid and scapula indicate divergent mechanisms for linking these elements in Enantiornithes and Euornithes. Abbreviations: C, coracoid; F, furcula; S, scapula; SC, scapulocoracoid; SP, sternal plates (unfused); ST, sternum. Illustrations modified from [77,111,116,117]. (b) Phylogeny of Ornithodira; colours indicate approximate frequency of pneumatization across the skeleton reported within each clade.
Phylogeny of bird-line archosaurs and the hierarchical evolutionary acquisition
Figure 3.
Phylogeny of bird-line archosaurs and the hierarchical evolutionary acquisition of a bird-like phenotype. White sectors of pie charts indicate retention of the plesiomorphic, non-neornithine condition. Faintly coloured sectors indicate an intermediate, near-crown-bird-like condition and saturated colours indicate the condition observed in crown birds. Purple, brain morphology; yellow, palate morphology; red, pectoral girdle morphology; blue, PSP.
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References

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