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Overview

When we’re young, we’re amazed by birds and their ability to fly. However, as we get older, that amazement fades away. It’s time to revisit just how amazing the bird is with its feathers and wings. Feathers are what make birds so unique and why they can live in every continent on Earth in such a variety of colors. So let’s look at how feathers evolved into a powerful force for animals today—even dinosaurs!

Big Idea #1: Rare fossils of feathered dinosaurs show the link between these ancient creatures and birds.

Do you ever wonder about bird’s evolutionary history?

Well, it’s a long-debated topic. One of the major sticking points in this discussion is that feathers are fragile and therefore rarely preserved in the fossil record.

Before this new evidence was found, it was difficult to trace the ancestry of flying creatures. But then a fossil link between modern birds and their ancient ancestors—the dinosaurs—was discovered.

A fossil of a bird-like dinosaur was discovered. It had feathers, which is unique to birds. Scientists found more and more feathers in the fossils they uncovered, shedding light on how birds evolved from dinosaurs. Some of the most important discoveries occurred in China during the 1990s when scientists found several feathered dinosaurs that were preserved by volcanic ash in an eruption.

From these fossils, we learned that feathers developed in stages. They started out as simple, unbranched quills and gradually grew more complex to become the flight feathers we know today.

Not only that, but as the fossils became more developed, we could see how they were related to modern birds. We can now say that dinosaurs evolved into birds.

Big Idea #2: There are two theories to describe how birds began flying – and the jury is still out.

Dinosaurs developed feathers that enabled them to fly, and birds eventually began using them for the same reason. But how did they do it? There are two main theories. One camp believes flight began with the fastest dinosaurs, which flapped their wings much like a chicken does today. This is an easier evolutionary path than jumping from great heights and finding out if you can fly or not by plummeting to your death.

However, there is a drawback to this theory. It requires specialized flight muscles and flexible shoulders for taking off. This feature was not present in the feathered dinosaurs, which means that they could not fly. Moreover, there is another theory called “tree-down”, which argues that flying creatures learned to fly by jumping from branch to branch. However, this does not explain how feathers evolved because simple gravity can get you airborne without having to have special flight muscles or a flexible shoulder joint. In fact, many animals jump down from above but none of them use feathers; instead they all rely on skin flaps (e.g., bats) or membranes (e.g., flying squirrels). Therefore it seems as if feathers are overdesigned for such an action since skin flaps would work just fine too!

Scientists are still unsure which idea is correct. It might be that both ideas have some truth to them.

Big Idea #3: Birds use color to impress, and some even change their looks according to their diet.

When people are looking for a mate, they tend to dress in their best clothes. Birds do the same thing with their colorful feathers. Sexual selection is one of the primary reasons for the wide variety of colors and mating rituals seen in birds all over the world.

In the wild, there is a lot of competition among males for females. Birds have very good vision and can see a broad spectrum of colors, so they use bright plumage to impress potential mates.