The Rise of Birds: 225 Million Years of Evolution / Edition 2 available in Hardcover, eBook
The Rise of Birds: 225 Million Years of Evolution / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 1421415909
- ISBN-13:
- 9781421415901
- Pub. Date:
- 04/01/2015
- Publisher:
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 1421415909
- ISBN-13:
- 9781421415901
- Pub. Date:
- 04/01/2015
- Publisher:
- Johns Hopkins University Press
The Rise of Birds: 225 Million Years of Evolution / Edition 2
Buy New
$62.00Buy Used
$46.62-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
A small set of fossilized bones discovered almost thirty years ago led paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee on a lifelong quest to understand their place in our understanding of the history of life. They were clearly the bones of something unusual, a bird-like creature that lived long, long ago in the age of dinosaurs. He called it Protoavis, and the animal that owned these bones quickly became a contender for the title of "oldest known bird." In 1997, Chatterjee published his findings in the first edition of The Rise of Birds.
Since then Chatterjee and his colleagues have searched the world for more transitional bird fossils. And they have found them. This second edition of The Rise of Birds brings together a treasure trove of fossils that tell us far more about the evolution of birds than we once dreamed possible.
With no blind allegiance to what he once thought he knew, Chatterjee devours the new evidence and lays out the most compelling version of the birth and evolution of the avian form ever attempted. He takes us from Texas to Spain, China, Mongolia, Madagascar, Australia, Antarctica, and Argentina. He shows how, in the "Cretaceous Pompeii" of China, he was able to reconstruct the origin and evolution of flight of early birds from the feathered dinosaurs that lay among thousands of other amazing fossils.
Chatterjee takes us to where long-hidden bird fossils dwell. His compelling, occasionally controversial, revelations—accompanied by spectacular illustrations—are a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in the evolution of "the feathered dinosaurs," from vertebrate paleontologists and ornithologists to naturalists and birders.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781421415901 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2015 |
| Edition description: | second edition |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Sales rank: | 723,076 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.70(w) x 11.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
From Protoavis to Pigeon
Surely there is nothing very wild or illegitimate in the hypothesis that the phylum of the Class of Aves has its foot in the Dinosaurian Reptiles--that these, passing through a series of such modifications as are exhibited in one of their phases by Compsognathus, have given rise to [birds].
--Thomas H. Huxley, "On the Animals Which Are Most Nearly Intermediate between the Birds and Reptiles," 1868
Birds in flight symbolize spirits released from the bondage of gravity. From the day that humans first looked up at the skies, birds have summoned a sense of wonder and mystery, enchanting our earth-bound ancestors with their freedom and song. They fly where they please and when they please. The power of flight has opened up to birds a multilayered network of aerial highways and byways, enabling them to reach any place on our planet. Birds are the most successful terrestrial vertebrate, abundant in both numbers of species and populations. Today they live on every continent and occupy virtually all available ecological niches. About 300 billion birds, over 9,000 species, now inhabit the earth, as compared to 3,000 species of amphibians, 6,000 species of reptiles, and 4,100 species of mammals (Gill 1990).
The Genealogy of Birds
Although birds are one of the best-known groups of living vertebrates, their origin, evolution, and early adaptive radiation are poorly documented in the fossil record. The rarity of bird fossils is generally attributed to the extreme fragility, lightness, pneumaticity, and general smallness of their bones. Moreover, the living habits of birds are not conducive to preservation of specimens, as most species prefer arboreal habitat. Except for a few solitary fossils, we have gained essentially no new knowledge of Mesozoic birds during the past century. Archaeopteryx lithographica from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone of Germany held center stage in avian evolution, being regarded by most researchers as the oldest and most primitive of known birds. Seventy million years after Archaeopteryx appeared, birds such as Hesperornis and Ichthyornis, from the Late Cretaceous of Kansas, had evolved into essentially modern forms, leaving no clues as to their reptilian heritage. It is no surprise that the Mesozoic has been referred to as the Dark Ages of avian history.
During the last fifteen years, the situation has changed dramatically as more and more fossils of Mesozoic birds have been unearthed from different sites around the globe. These Mesozoic birds vary widely in size and possess a wide range of body shapes and ecological adaptations. The new discoveries and the application of cladistics have inspired novel ideas about the antiquity of birds, their evolution, and their phylogenetic relationships. These data have triggered a renaissance in avian paleontology.
Birds, which took to the air during the age of the dinosaurs, are generally classified as Aves, a class separate from the rest of the vertebrates, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. Beauty, grace, feathers, and aerial prowess conceal the true identity and heritage of birds. What is the phylogenetic position of birds among vertebrates? Who were their immediate evolutionary ancestors? These questions have perplexed evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin. Darwin's friend and champion, Thomas Huxley (1867, 1868a, 1868b, 1870), presented a radical proposal that birds are merely glorified reptiles. He classified reptiles and birds in the same group, Sauropsida. He reasoned that, if birds had not been so outstandingly successful in their aerial adaptation and speciation and if they had remained a relatively small group like pterosaurs, they would now be regarded as an order of reptiles, not a separate class of vertebrates. Huxley was impressed with the stunning similarities in bipedal posture, erect gait, and mesotarsal ankle joint between Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus, a contemporary theropod dinosaur from the Solnhofen Limestone. For several decades, the famed Eichstatt specimen of Archaeopteryx was mistakenly identified as a juvenile individual of Compsognathus, indicating how alike these two genera are (Wellnhofer 1974). The fact that theropods and birds always walked bipedally is intriguing and may indicate a common evolutionary history, Huxley argued. Bipedalism is a rare evolutionary event in the history of vertebrates and requires a great deal of balancing and coordination. In birds we see the culmination of this coordination and proprioception. Marsh (1877, 1880) embraced Huxley's proposal of a theropod-bird link when he described Cretaceous toothed birds such as Hesperornis and Ichthyornis.
In 1926, however, Gerhard Heilmann (1926) swept away the hypothesis of the theropod ancestry of birds in his influential book The Origin of Birds. He argued that such small theropods as coelurosaurs, however birdlike in skeletal morphology, could not be considered the ancestors of birds because they lacked clavicles, from which birds derive their furcula. Heilmann was guided by Dollo's law of irreversibility: evolution does not backtrack to recover characteristics. For birds to evolve from theropods, the lost furcula would have to reappear. Faced with such a paradox, Heilmann made a very reasonable suggestion. He argued that both birds and dinosaurs had evolved from a common ancestor. He sought the common ancestor among bipedal "pseudosuchian thecodonts," such as Euparkeria and Ornithosuchus, which retained the clavicle. From this ancestral stock, two great evolutionary lineages diverged, one leading to dinosaurs and the other to birds. For the next fifty years, Heilmann's pseudosuchian theory enjoyed wide acceptance among evolutionary biologists, with some new variations, such as the crocodilian connection of birds (Walker 1972; Martin 1985).
After almost a century, John Ostrom (1969, 1973, 1976a, 1985a, 1991) revived Huxley's theropod origin of birds and suggested that small theropods, such as dromaeosaurs, come very close indeed to the ancestry of birds. Huxley emphasized mesotarsal ankle structure as the key to the theropod-bird relationship, whereas Ostrom pointed out unique wrist morphology--the semilunate carpal--as the common link between dromaeosaurs and birds. Dromaeosaur fossils are known from the Cretaceous of North America and Asia. These little theropods had slashing toe-claws and were agile and formidable predators, which probably hunted in packs. One of the famous dromaeosaurs from Mongolia, Velociraptor, became the undisputed star in Steven Spielberg's movie Jurassic Park. In spite of their mean appearances, dromaeosaurs offer important insights into the origin of birds. Ostrom presented an impressive array of skeletal similarities between Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurs, such as a long coracoid, long arms equipped with three fingers, a swivel wrist joint, long slender hind legs, a three-toed foot, and a stiff tail. Except for feathers, Archaeopteryx would look like a small dromaeosaur, Ostrom argued. The striking resemblance between Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurs must reflect a common descent, not evolutionary convergence. He emphasized the recent discovery of clavicles in some coelurosaurs, which countered Heilmann's principal objection to a theropod ancestry of birds.
Although Ostrom suggested that birds were the direct descendants of dromaeosaurs, he used traditional classification to separate these two groups; he placed the birds in their own class, Aves, and dinosaurs in Class Reptilia, contrary to Huxley's grouping. However, his former student, Robert T. Bakker (1975), concluded that birds are actually theropod dinosaurs, not just descended from them. Like Huxley, Bakker argued that birds should not have their own separate class because they fly. Bats fly, too, but they are still considered mammals. Birds are as much dinosaurs as bats are mammals.
To understand the bird's place in the dinosaur family tree, we must know the interrelationships of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs began their evolutionary history as small carnivores during the Late Triassic. They became diversified within a relatively short period and then ruled the earth for approximately 160 million years. During that time they adapted to a wide range of conditions and environments and became very successful. All known dinosaurs are divided into two major groups on the basis of pelvic structure: Saurischia and Ornithischia. The Saurischia contains two subgroups: the plant-eating, mostly quadrupedal sauropodomorphs and the carnivorous, bipedal theropods. The Ornithischia includes several subgroups of herbivorous dinosaurs--armored thyreophorans (such as stegosaurs and ankylosaurs), and horned plus duck-billed cerapodans (such as ceratopsians and ornithopods) (fig. 1.1A). The theropods are the most spectacular of all dinosaurs and are linked to the ancestry of birds.
The theropod-bird relationship is strengthened with the application of cladistic analysis. Cladistics differs from older methods of biological classification by using the distribution of evolutionary novelties, called shared derived characters or synapomorphies. A clade is a group of animals that share uniquely evolved features and therefore a common ancestry. Recognition of a clade or monophyletic group by synapomorphies is the most important step in cladistic hypothesis. Willie Hennig, the German entomologist, first formalized the cladistic method in 1966. During the past two decades, cladistics has been used extensively to infer the phylogenetic relationships among different groups of plants and animals. Using this technique, Jacques Gauthier (1986) provided the first detailed hypothesis of theropod relationships on the basis of skeletal morphology; he recognized several monophyletic groups, or clades, in a hierarchical pattern. These successive clades are Theropoda, Tetanurae, Coelurosauria, Maniraptora, and Aves (fig. 1.1B). The new phylogenetic relationship suggests that birds are a member of theropods. In fact, birds are now considered not only glorified theropods but also the sole surviving lineage of dinosaurs. The flying-dinosaur image of birds is appealing to the public and also is gaining currency among paleontologists (Weishampel, Dodson, and Osmolska 1990; Sereno and Rao 1992; Chiappe 1995a).
If we look at Gauthier's cladograms (fig. 1.1), it becomes clear that birds should possess all of the characteristics of dinosaurs, saurischians, theropods, tetanurans, coelurosaurs, and maniraptorans in a nested pattern (although some of them may have been lost or modified), but that they are also characterized by a suite of characters uniquely their own. In the phylogenetic scheme, birds are the most derived group of theropods, which acquired many evolutionary novelties in the context of their flight adaptation. The definition and interrelationships of major clades of birds, discussed in a later section, are shown in figure 1.1C.
The Ancestry of Birds
Dromaeosaurs were the closest relatives of birds and shared the most recent common ancestry. The early fossil record of dromaeosaurs is obscure. Thus far, known dromaeosaurs appeared fairly late during the Cretaceous, when birds were already well established. Dromaeosaurs did not continue to become more birdlike. Instead, in their evolutionary course they specialized in killing mechanisms and became considerably larger than birds. The common ancestor of birds and dromaeosaurs has yet to be found in the fossil record. However, we can speculate from cladistic analysis that this hypothetical bird ancestor would be very similar to dromaeosaurs in general morphology. For simplicity, we can refer to this ancestral form as protodromaeosaurs. Heilmann (1926) coined the neutral term proavian for this hypothetical ancestor. How big was the proavian? We can guess its size from the evolutionary trend in vertebrates, defined in Cope's law. This law states that, in the course of time, all animals tend to evolve larger body sizes. If Cope's law holds true, the ancestral proavian would be considerably smaller than later dromaeosaur descendants. The proavian may match the size of Archaeopteryx and would have given rise to two lineages, birds and dromaeosaurs. Dromaeosaurs are currently the best approximation of the hypothetical bird ancestor and serve as a model when tracing avian ancestry (fig. 1.2).
The Antiquity of Birds
For years, Archaeopteryx was considered to be the oldest bird known, but its position has recently been usurped by Protoavis texensis from the Late Triassic Dockum Group of Texas, predating Archaeopteryx by 75 million years (Chatterjee 1987a, 1991, 1994, 1995, in press; Kurochkin 1995; Peters 1994). Identification of Archaeopteryx as a bird is a simple task because Archaeopteryx possesses feathers. The recognition of Protoavis as a primitive bird requires a thorough knowledge of comparative anatomy of the skeleton because feather impressions were not found with the specimens. Resembling a small nonavian theropod in the rear, Protoavis reveals its avian identity in the front portions of the skeleton. It is an excellent example of mosaic evolution, in which some conservative ancestral characters of contemporary nonavian theropods occur with the advanced characters typical of later birds. This mingling of primitive and advanced characteristics seems to have been a common evolutionary pattern in the origination of higher groups of vertebrates.
The primitive characters of Protoavis include four metacarpals in the hand, a short ascending process on the astragalus, and a long bony tail. On the other hand, Protoavis is fully avian in some significant ways. Its temporal configuration is modified in avian fashion, with the development of streptostylic quadrate and upper jaw mobility. Its braincase is highly inflated, and the orbits are frontally placed. It has heterocoelous (saddle-shaped) centra in the neck, as do modern birds. Protoavis has a much more efficient and advanced wing structure than does Archaeopteryx. It has a birdlike coracoid and furcula and a keeled sternum for flapping flight. The hand bones show quill nodes for the attachment of primary feathers. The pelvis shows fusion of the ilium and ischium for strength and rigidity, whereas the hindlimbs are reoriented to shift the functional joint from hip to knee.
Detailed cladistic analysis indicates that Archaeopteryx is a basal taxon of Aves, whereas Protoavis had achieved a structural organization well beyond that of Archaeopteryx and is a member of the Ornithothoraces (fig. 1.1C). Archaeopteryx thus seems to be a late example of the ancestral type, a "living fossil" in the Jurassic world. The recognition of Protoavis as the first bird marks a critical departure from earlier thinking on the origin of birds and the evolution of flight. It provides a more complex picture of morphological diversity early in bird evolution, showing a bushlike adaptive radiation.
However, the discovery of a Triassic bird is not totally surprising. More than a century ago, Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh (1880) cogently argued that three Mesozoic taxa, Archaeopteryx, Hesperornis, and Ichthyornis, differ so widely from one another that the evolution of birds must have taken place at a much earlier time, perhaps at the end of the Triassic. He predicted that Triassic birds with a freely movable quadrate bone would be found to fill the major morphological and evolutionary gaps in avian history. Protoavis approaches the predicted structure and size of the ancestral bird envisioned by Marsh. It pushes the avian origin back to the Late Triassic, to the very dawn of the age of the dinosaurs.
Thus, the new avian odyssey begins some 225 million years ago, when Protoavis took to the air over tropical Texas forests. This is the beginning of the age of birds. Throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous, birds diversified, perfected their flight maneuvers, and adapted to various niches during the continental fragmentation. The road from Protoavis to pigeon requires a long evolutionary march, with frequent roundabouts and blind alleys. It is paved with the temporary dominance of several different extinct lineages until the Late Cretaceous, when Neornithes (modern birds) emerged. Most Cretaceous birds, such as enantiornithes, hesperornithiforms, Patagopteryx, and other less well-known groups, disappeared about 65 million years ago, along with nonavian dinosaurs. Rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of this catastrophe, the neornithine lineage underwent an explosive adaptive radiation of modern forms during the Tertiary.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Second EditionPreface to the First Edition1. Mesozoic Pompeii2. The Evolution of an Airframe3. The Origin of Birds4. Archaeopteryx5. Protoavis6. Basal Avialans7. Pygostylia8. Enantiornithes9. Ornithuromorphs10. The End- Cretaceous Mass Extinction11. The Avian Revolution Begins12. The Origin of Flight13. Eggs, Embryos, and Heterochrony14. Feathers and Footprints15. The Feeding Mechanism and Cranial Kinesis16. Birds and HumansBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
The Rise of Birds is a clearly presented, very complete, and enjoyable to read documentation of the evolution of birds. For all who have questions about the origin of birds, of flight and diversity, this well-illustrated book holds the answers. It includes new analyses of the birds and feathered dinosaurs discovered in China. After reading this book I shall forever see birds with a new understanding.
New finds and new technologies have caused a revolution in the science of avian origins, and Chatterjee draws on these as he paints a detailed and engaging picture of the evolutionary tapestry of feathered dinosaurs and early birds.
Eminent paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee provides a splendid overview of the current paleontological orthodox, plying through the highly contentious waters of bird and flight origin controversies with exemplary scholarship and much needed civility. In a field with strong beliefs, he skillfully illustrates the currently popular views and shows where striking areas of uncertainty persist.—Alan Feduccia, University of North Carolina
New finds and new technologies have caused a revolution in the science of avian origins, and Chatterjee draws on these as he paints a detailed and engaging picture of the evolutionary tapestry of feathered dinosaurs and early birds.—Lawrence M. Witmer, Ohio University
A fascinating and well-illustrated review of the fossil record of birds that offers the most updated and informative account of the remarkable recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs and early birds from China. Chatterjee's book is a must-read for vertebrate paleontologists, ornithologists, and anyone who wants to know how birds evolved from dinosaurs.—Zhonghe Zhou, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
The Rise of Birds is a clearly presented, very complete, and enjoyable to read documentation of the evolution of birds. For all who have questions about the origin of birds, of flight and diversity, this well-illustrated book holds the answers. It includes new analyses of the birds and feathered dinosaurs discovered in China. After reading this book I shall forever see birds with a new understanding.—David Dilcher, Indiana University
Eminent paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee provides a splendid overview of the current paleontological orthodox, plying through the highly contentious waters of bird and flight origin controversies with exemplary scholarship and much needed civility. In a field with strong beliefs, he skillfully illustrates the currently popular views and shows where striking areas of uncertainty persist.
A fascinating and well-illustrated review of the fossil record of birds that offers the most updated and informative account of the remarkable recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs and early birds from China. Chatterjee’s book is a must-read for vertebrate paleontologists, ornithologists, and anyone who wants to know how birds evolved from dinosaurs.