Modern Birds Likely Descended From Feathered Dinosaurs That Glided, New Study Reveals

New research shows that modern birds evolved from gliding, feathered dinosaurs, Discovery News reported on Wednesday. The study, conducted by researchers Nicholas Longrich, Jakob Vinther and Anthony Russell, examined the fossils of two birdlike dinosaurs.

According to Live Science, the group of scientists studied the wing feathers of Anchiornis huxley and Archaeopteryx lithographica and found that the two dinosaurs had "dense overlapping layers of wing feathers that were likely to separate." The study revealed that the creatures did not use their wings for flying but instead opted to glide from certain heights.

In a statement, Vinther, from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, said, "We now seem to see that feathers evolved initially for insulation." The study also found that while the wing feathers of the two creatures were similar, differences appear to show slight evolution of the wing.

The study, which will be published in the latest issue of Current Biology, revealed that Archaeopteryx had layers of long flight feathers whereas Anchiornis had overlapping strip-like feathers, Discovery News reported. Both feather types impeded flight liftoff.

"Modern birds have the ability to separate their wing feathers sort of like a Venetian blind," Longrich explained. "This allows them to raise the win rapidly, and seems to be critical to flapping flight at low speeds."

The Yale University paleontologist added, "The feather arrangement in Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis wouldn't let them do this, so it may have made takeoff from the ground and flapping at low speeds more difficult."

However, the primitive birdlike creatures were able to glide, Longrich said. "Gliding is a fast way to move from tree-to-tree. Instead of climbing down one tree and running up the next, you just glide quickly from one to the other," he said.

The researchers believe that modern bird wing feather arrangements may have happened over a span of a few tens of millions of years before remaining unchanged for the last 130 million years. "Birds hit on a workable design about 130 million years ago, and it's been difficult to improve upon it," Longrich said.

Longrich and his colleagues' study "is definitively a significant discovery," Xu Xing, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Discovery News.

"[The study] has greatly improved our understanding of wing evolution," Xu said. "[The researchers] demonstrate that there are unusual wings near the dinosaur-bird transition, though more data is needed to confirm the claim that it is directly related to the origins of avian flight."