For dinosaurs, feathers didn’t equate to flight

Not everything that looks like a bird was a bird, especially in the Jurassic period. Recent discoveries have pushed Archaeopteryx away from its perch as a transitional dinosaur-tobird fossil — there is now a crowd of finely feathered dinosaurs.

Archaeopteryx was probably not, Voeten said, a direct tie to sparrows and ostriches but a member of an offshoot lineage.

As scientists have probed Archaeopteryx’s family tree, they also have questioned its ability to fly.

In the new study, Voeten and his colleagues probed Archaeopteryx fossils using a synchrotron — a powerful source of radiation. The concept is similar to an Xray, but your dentist’s X-ray machine would fail to distinguish fossilized skeletons from the rock.

Voeton said bones record our daily stress.

Likewise, the stress of flying reshapes the wing bones in modern birds. He decided to look for similar evidence in Archaeopteryx.

The study authors examined cross-sections of the Archaeopteryx bones and compared the structures to bones in flying birds, flightless birds, other dinosaurs and modern crocodilians.

The Archaeopteryx bone characteristics resembled what Voeten called “burst fliers.” These are birds like pheasants, roadrunners and turkeys — animals comfortable on the ground but capable of taking flight with a snap of the wings.

The study moves Archaeopteryx from a potential flying animal to a probable one, he concluded.