Show a young child a feather and they will proudly say, “bird”. Show an older child the feather and they might gleefully say, “dinosaur”. It’s a source of smugness my generation missed out on because, back then, dinosaurs were supposed to be covered in scales, not to mention extinct. What changed, and if birds really are dinosaurs, why did it take so long to make the connection? Archaeopteryx / by Peter Montgomery / CC BY-NC 2.0 The first “missing link” between reptiles and birds was found way back in the 1860’s. Archaeopteryx had a long tail with many vertebrae, as well as strong curved claws - like a dinosaur - but its feathered wings were enough to define it as a primitive bird by simply stretching the definition of birds. When teeth were found on some specimens (the first discovery was headless), the solution was to stretch the definition of birds a little further. Enter Thomas Henry Huxley, the outspoken champion of Darwin’s freshly minted theory of evoluti...
Explaining one small piece of the universe in each article