Saturday musings: Which dinosaurs survived?
The ones that shrank the fastest.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/122888033
thanks to tblue37 for this article, which came to mind when I took the #1 photo of the Blue Jay which looked so Jurassic. I grabbed a few representative photos of dinosaurs being dinosaurs. Be glad they got smaller.
Birds are the remnants of the fastest-evolving group of dinosaurs.
The family tree of more than 1,500! skeletal characteristics over 50 million years, shows that the theropods—the carnivorous dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus, that would eventually become birds—shrank markedly at least 12 times. Starting from an average mass of 163 kilograms, the theropod suborder eventually produced the .8 kilogram Archaeopteryx, which is considered the earliest bird.
The theropods were the only group to continually push the envelope when it came to skeletal size. It's possible that herbivores simply couldn't shrink, since a plant-based diet requires a larger gut for digestion. Meanwhile, theropods could explore alternate resources, habitats, and even prey. "It would have permitted them to chase insects, climb trees, leap and glide, and eventually develop powered flight, "All of these activities would have led to novel new anatomical adaptations." So as the dinosaurs shrank, their other features evolved more quickly (which led to faster shrinking to take advantage of these new abilities, and so on).
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