Origin of avian flight

The origin of birds from theropod dinosaurs is one of the great locomotory transitions in the history of life. Unlike the situation with basal members of the other flying vertebrate clades, bats and pterosaurs, the fossil record of early flying dinosaurs is remarkably complete, including excellent preservation of taxa with incipient flight anatomy. That means the ecological context and selective pressures that drove the transition to avian flight can be documented in a detail rarely available to us.

I have been working on the origin of birds for over two decades. My first platform presentation, at the 2000 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, was on the topic (Primary and caudal feathers as locomotory adaptations in maniraptoran theropods). Ongoing goals include disentangling the “ground up versus trees down” debate, building a framework that lets competing models of bird origins be tested more explicitly against the fossil record, and documenting how the history of dinosaur research and typological thinking has shaped modern ideas about bird origins (spoiler: not for the better).

Papers and presentations from this work, and the colleagues who have collaborated on it, are listed below.