This topic is all the more exciting to me, as it seems likely to fill out with a lot more evidence in the coming couple of decades. I'm fascinated by the Permian era, populated as it was with the precursors to reptiles, birds and mammals, but being so much further back in deep time, its study may be less likely to develop at a fast pace.
Excellent discussion...Thank you for this! What about the origin of 'dino fuzz' being for body temperature control? I am surprised that this possibility was not mentioned, other than a brief mention of 'brooding behavior'.
@@EvolutionSoup Thanks for pointing that out. Either RU-vid put an ad there or I just completely missed it! lol. Glad it was in there. Really great content, thanks again!
@@LukeInk No problem at all! Corwin is such a wealth of information; he managed to squeeze in lots of detail in this one interview! Thanks so much for your support.
Insects have evolved much before the birds. Many have flying capacity. With no predators pursuing on their tails, insects might have become bigger in size, causing an opportunity for the ground dwellers. Stalking them from the high trees, the ground dwellers could have developed gliding, parachuting which might have become the impetus to develop the flight feathers,
So we don't know why flight feathers evolved or when flight originated. Personally I favor the display / insulation reason for feathers. As to flight, it probably developed accidentally. We know that birds jump to get airborne, so maybe it was an aid to gaining access to prey by getting some lift from port-wings. I think that new need to consider what is required for gliding flight as opposed to powered flight. Gliding flight is easier to understand, but even so the anime would require to be as light as possible to be really useful, or quite small, or both. Powered flight requires the development of flight surfaces capable of giving sufficient lift. All modern birds that fly have a well developed keel for the attachment of powerful muscles to drive the wings. They also have hollow bones and a highly developed system of blood oxygenation via air sacs. I think then that we ned to look for these characteristics in early bird-like ancestors. There could of course be more than one way all the evolved, and it may have occurred several time independently. All interesting stuff, and a question we may never answer for sure.
Every one of these interviews I have tried to watch would have been easier to listen to if the guest expert had prepared a script addressing the subject matter and presented it, rather than using this dragging interview format.
