Oviraptorosaurs are weird dinosaurs that look a bit like flightless birds. But these ancient animals aren't just ...

Decades of major new discoveries and studies have convinced researchers that there’s a direct link between modern bird species and theropod dinosaurs. Once dinosaurs were thought of as scaled-up ...

Despite the increasingly clear picture of the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs that has emerged, a few scientists are still unconvinced. No alternative hypothesis has been offered to ...

While the non-avian dinosaurs disappeared after the catastrophic asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the lineage of theropod dinosaurs gave rise to modern birds. This evolutionary triumph ...

Scientists suggest that bigger brains in bird ancestors led to more flexible skulls, playing a key role in their evolution.

Dinosaurs are the extinct relatives of birds that roamed the lands and seas of ancient Earth. They first appeared around 240 ...

Clearly, Ostrom argued, birds were the living descendants of theropods. Still, many known theropods had big legs, short arms, and stout, long tails—hardly the anatomy one would expect on a ...

An analysis of nearly 120 dinosaur species and more than 1,500 skeletal features revealed that the theropod lineages that are thought to have been direct ancestors of birds evolved skeletal ...

A cascade of changes from dinosaurs to birds When the team analyzed data from the 3D models, they saw that as brain and skull sizes increased in non-avian theropod dinosaurs, muscles shifted into ...

D modeling reveals that as bird brains grew larger, it led to changes in jaw muscles and joint mechanics—enabling the ...

Like feathers, most of the other traits needed for flight also evolved long before the first birds. Scientists believe many of these features appeared at various points across the evolution of ...

Oviraptorosaurs are weird dinosaurs, which look a bit like flightless birds. But these ancient animals aren’t just funny ...