Quarantine entry #8 - March 29

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. To make matters worse – yes, I am whining here – I got nothing planned for my escapism today. So, let us talk about something different… how about Archaeopteryx?

Pause. What about the Archaeopteryx? It is a very peculiar creature, part bird, part non-avian dinosaur. It was the first feathered dinosaur that was discovered and an important part in building both the evolutionary theory in general and the dinosaurs to birds in particular. What next?

Archaeopteryx was not a direct ancestor of the modern birds, no more so than the Microraptor is. Indeed, the issue of theropod dinosaurs and feathers is an especially messy one, seeing how paleontologists swing from them being all featherless to being all feathered – and that’s without mentioning such franchises as the ‘Jurassic Park’ one, which tends to ignore this issue entirely.

Pause. ‘Jurassic Park III’ had partially feathered raptors, (unlike the first two movies). Pause. ‘Jurassic World’ went back to completely featherless raptors. Pause. So where is the Archaeopteryx? Nowhere, that is where.

Pause. Archaeopteryx always was a ghost presence in the various franchises of this sort; my most vivid memory of it is in the dino segment of Disney’s ‘Fantasia’, where it has a brief cameo – escaping a harassing Coelurus or some similar dinosaur. That is it.

On the other hand, there are plenty of scientific documentaries about this dinosaur, (Hell, birds are dinosaurs themselves, live with it). Maybe this is why many people in Hollywood and the like prefer to avoid Archaeopteryx – it is too well known, too established, too unique for them to mess with it, and so they avoid it. Various dino-based games do feature it, but again mostly on secondary roles – it is not that big and scary, it seems.

How big was it, (especially in real life)? About the size of a modern crow, I would say. I first met it – as a grown-up, not as a child with a coloring book – in Josef Benes’ work about the evolution of life on Earth; Archaeopteryx, of course, was discussed in the chapter concerning the evolution of birds, from a mythical ‘Proavis’ to Hesperornis, (and Ichthyornis), and beyond. So what?

Well, Zdenek Burian, a painter and a man who is respected even now for his artwork, illustrated Benes’ book. Moreover, his ‘Proavis’, (aka the theoretical proto-bird) was depicted a lot like the real-life Microraptor, albeit a more toned-down one, but! The real-life Microraptor was not a direct bird ancestor either!

Here is the crunch. There are two ways of moving through the air – actively flying and passively gliding. Insects aside, the only animals that fly by their own power, (and not via airplanes or helicopters, say), are birds, bats, and the extinct pterosaurs. While none of them are related to each other, and everyone’s wing evolved via its’ own design, they all have enough similar traits, including the wings itself and also the keel bones, (extensions of the breastbone/sternum) which are the bones to which the wing muscles’ attach. Because of this, birds, bats and pterosaurs were able to flap their wings actively and generate lift, among other things. Even the flightless penguins retained their keel bones – they do fly in a manner of speaking, underwater.

Archaeopteryx did not have a particularly well developed breastbone or keel bones, so it is unclear if it could fly actively, or just glide passively, if it lacked the anatomical apparatus of the modern birds. Of course, its’ wing muscles could’ve attached to some other bones – Archaeopteryx already had fused collarbones as the modern birds do – but this again makes Archaeopteryx a member of a different branch of the theropod/bird family tree. Where does it leave the ‘Proavis’, however?

So far, it is unknown. The birds’ evolution, especially during the Jurassic, still has more gaps than filler, so it is still hard to make any secure statements. Anatomically modern birds begin to appear at the end of the Cretaceous, but again, if it was not for the K/T extinction, it is anyone’s guess as to how they would have fit alongside the rest of the dinosaurs – theropods, sauropods, ornithischians – and the other reptiles. Given that alternate history is a sci-fi rather than a documentary genre, we will stop here.

Anything else? Sadly, no. Real life sucks, just look at the Archaeopteryx: it died out without leaving any descendants. It has sprouted many lively discussions, however, and the birds themselves are living alongside us to this day. Life goes on, but we may not always be a part of it.

…This is it for now; see you all soon!