An interesting story. Recently, Academician Zhou Zhong from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in an open class that the study believes that dinosaurs did not completely disappear in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, and there are still their descendants on the earth.
So, did you find a living dinosaur? Who are their descendants?
Although the age of dinosaurs has passed more than 60 million years ago, there are still many unsolved mysteries about dinosaurs, especially in many parts of the world, there are legends about "water monsters", and there have always been many people who believe that a small number of dinosaur survivors have escaped mass extinction and evolved all the way to this day.
For example, some people believe that the so-called "water monster" is most likely a "plesiosaur" that appeared as early as the Triassic period more than 200 million years ago, but this speculation has no scientific basis.
So, could it be that scientists have found living dinosaurs? Otherwise, why would Academician Zhou Zhong say this? Speaking of which, the "descendants of dinosaurs" in Academician Zhou Zhong's mouth are not living dinosaurs, but another huge population of dinosaurs evolved into- birds.
Although the complete evolutionary tree has not yet been fully established, the mainstream view is that the ancestors of birds are some kind of small dinosaurs, so from an evolutionary point of view, it is correct to say that dinosaurs are not completely extinct, because some of them evolved into birds, and quickly replenished after the Cretaceous mass extinction, together with mammals became the new world masters.
So, were the ancestors of birds really dinosaurs?
Many people believe that the ancestors of birds should be "pterosaurs", after all, pterosaurs are a large reptile that flew from the Triassic period, but there is no relationship between pterosaurs and early birds, and pterosaurs do not belong to dinosaurs, they belong to different species of parallel evolution.
The study believes that along with the evolution of dinosaurs, some of the small dinosaurs evolved feathers and gradually learned to fly, and pterosaurs flew from the ground to the sky, the process of dinosaur evolution towards primitive birds should be to dive down from the branches of the tree, and then eventually fly to the sky, the process is somewhat similar to bats learning to fly.
So, were dinosaurs really the ancestors of birds? Since the discovery of the fossil archaeopteryx in 1861, the answer to this question has gradually begun to become clear, although it has been later confirmed that Archaeopteryx is not the earliest bird, but a small theropod dinosaur with feathers but cannot fly, but because it has a similar structure to primitive birds, its appearance still inspires scientists to study the origin of birds.
From the perspective of time, the earliest birds should appear in the Jurassic period, about 140 million years ago, and later in the Cretaceous Period, the evolution of primitive birds entered the "white-hot" stage, this period, but also let the primitive birds in the survival competition, seize the territory of the pterosaur, so that the pterosaur was naturally eliminated before the extinction.
At the same time, in recent years, the research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also proved the "kinship" relationship between birds and dinosaurs from many aspects. For example, in 2020, the research team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that in the process of dinosaur evolution toward birds, in order to reduce their weight, they gave up one side of the ovaries, so that the body structure could be adjusted so that they could fly into the sky.
There are also a large number of small theropod dinosaurs and primitive bird fossils found in the western Liaoning region of the mainland since the 1990s, which also proves that dinosaurs are most likely the ancestors of birds, especially the "Beipiplex" discovered in 1997, many scholars in the world believe that it is the earliest bird that cannot fly, somewhat similar to the ostrich in modern birds.
So, who else could the ancestors of birds be?
Although the mainstream view accepts the hypothesis that "birds originated from small theropod dinosaurs", it lacks key evidence, such as the fossilization of the transitional link of the evolutionary process, and this is the most critical problem, just as in the process of studying the origin of human beings, it is necessary to find the fossils of each link to confirm which species of apes are the direct ancestors of early humans.
Therefore, in addition to the belief that early birds originated from dinosaurs, there are other views on the international conjecture about the ancestors of birds. For example, the idea that the ancestors of birds may have been some sort of "crocodile" seems to suggest that birds and modern crocodiles are more closely related. In addition, there are views that birds originated from slotted toothed species, although of course, these two views are less argumentable than the "dinosaur hypothesis".
At present, the question of the origin of birds mainly focuses on what kind of small dinosaurs they originated from. Is it the evolution of a single species, the evolution of multiple species? Also, when exactly did the first birds appear? How exactly does it fly? These need to be answered by finding more fossils. Of course, the international community believes that in the northern part of the mainland, it is possible that the world's earliest bird origin, especially in the western Liaoning region of the mainland, what do you think about this?