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Dinosaur's Digits Show How Birds Got Wings

from Nature News

Birds are generally considered to be the living descendants of dinosaurs, yet differences between bird wings and dinosaur hands have long left palaeontologists struggling to explain how birds would have evolved from their dinosaur ancestors.

Birds' wings are thought to form from the fusion of the second, third and fourth digits on their hands as the embryo develops. Theropods, the predominantly carnivorous dinosaurs that included tyrannosaurids such as Tyrannosaurus rex and dromaeosaurids such as Velociraptor mongoliensis, also only had three long fingers.

... Now, a team led by Xing Xu from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and James Clark from The George Washington University in Washington, DC, is proposing a simpler answer based on a new dinosaur species found in Jurassic rocks formed 156 million to 161 million years ago in the Junggar Basin in western China.