Pelicans and other modern birds with throat pouches aredescended from dinosaurs, not pterosaurs, which were reptiles. ... Wang suggests that pterosaurs evolved throat pouches when faced with fish ripe for the picking, just as the ancestors of pelicans did. Did pterosaurs evolve from theropods?
How did birds, reptiles, and amphibians survive the Ice Age? Do amphibians have a body temperature? Do amphibians have a constant body temperature? How did amphibians survive extinction? How do amphibians absorb food? How can amphibians obtain oxygen?
But over the last three decades dinosaur fossils have been discovered with many different types of feathers, leading scientists to believe they are instead the ancestors of birds. Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not fly, prompting a new mystery: If not to take flight, why did they evo...
to more richly interconnected central nervous systems in more complex invertebrates and vertebrates from the Cambrian period onward to the progressively more sophisticated capacities of brains in larger animals (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and also cephalopods) in the last few hu...
How many reptiles lived before the Permian extinction? How are endangered species being kept from extinction? What animals lived during the Triassic period? How did sharks survive so many mass extinctions? How long was the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction?
Evolution is fascinating because it attempts to answer one of the most basic human questions: Where did life, and human beings, come from? The theory of evolution proposes that life and humans arose through a natural process. A very large number of people do not believe this, which is somet...
... Previously, pterodactyls were thought to only be able to take to the air once they had grown to almost full size, just like birds or bats.How Did Giant Pterosaurs Fly?37 related questions found Did any dinosaurs fly? But there were many flying, non-avian reptiles that lived ...
This adaptation is thought to have been crucial for tetrapod (amphibians, mammals, reptiles and birds) evolution during our transition from water to land in the Late Devonian period, some 375 million years ago. Many of the genes involved in forming limbs and digits in tetrapods are also found...
Moon and stars - Planetarium experiments have proved that many birds rely on stellar cues to figure out which way to migrate. We can even tell which star they are orienting from (Betelgeuse, in the case of indigos - [source: Purves]). Wildebeest crossing creek bed in the Masai Mara, Ken...
The earliest known reptiles are so amphibian-like that their assignment to one category or the other is largely a matter of opinion. In this area of life, however, there was no missing link; all the gradations from amphibian to reptile exist with a clarity seldom equaled in paleontology. ...