On Monday, March 1st, Songline Emu Farm brought a dozen fertile Emu eggs to Jim Sirch, Public Education Coordinator at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. These eggs will be hatched by the museum staff as part of their "Hatching the Past Exhibit" to demonstrate what dinosaur hatching was like.

The dinosaur-bird connection was first made in the late 1860’s when scientist Thomas Henry Huxley recognized that the hipbones, leg bones, skull, feet and many other skeletal parts of certain dinosaurs were similar to the bones of birds. In 1870 he wrote "…if the whole hindquarters from the ileum to the tail, of a half-hatched chicken could be suddenly enlarged, ossified, and fossilized as they are, they would furnish us with the last step of the transition between Birds and Reptiles; for there would be nothing in their characters to prevent us from referring them to the Dinosauria."

Yet, 100 years later most scientists continued to believe birds evolved from a different branch of the evolutionary tree. In 1964, Yale paleontologist, John H. Ostrom unearthed a dinosaur skeleton in southern Montana that struck him as birdlike. Unlike many other dinosaurs, it had a swiveling wrist, walked on its hind limbs and appeared to be warm-blooded. Intrigued, he traveled to a museum in Germany and began to compare his discovery to remains of the oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which flourished during the Jurassic period along-side dinosaurs. He matched up their backbones, limbs, toes and pelvises. The similarities prompted him to publish in 1973, asserting his theory, backed by physical evidence that birds including Archaeopteryx evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs that had developed feathers -- not for flight, but for warmth.

Ostrom provoked a debate that raged for decades. Many ornithologists, in particular, rejected his notion, and asked why, if this was the case, no dinosaur fossils with feathers had been found. It wasn’t until an amazing discovery in China in 1996 that Ostrom was vindicated. A 130 million-year-old dinosaur fossil was found, preserved by volcanic ash, covered head-to-tail with imprints of fluff and feathers. Since then numerous other dinosaur fossils with indications of feathers have been unearthed.

While all modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, ratites (flightless birds having flat breastbones lacking a keel for attachment of flight muscles: ostriches; cassowaries; emus; moas; rheas; kiwis; elephant birds) are thought to be of a more primitive branch having been placed in the superorder - Paleognatheus (old jaw). All other living birds belong to the superorder Neognathus (new jaw). This distinction is based, as best I can determine ,on nasal and skull structures as well as the male raising of babies.

In the next newsletter I’ll further explore the evolution of Ratites.

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