Archaeopteryx a Bird, Not a Dinosaur

New research on the anatomy of the fine-feathered creature says it was the first ever bird, not just a dinosaur with bird-like features.

The debate over whether archaeopteryx was Earth's first bird or just a bird-like dinosaur seems to have tilted toward the former, with an Australian paleontologist claiming that the famed feathered creature's anatomy had more in common with birds than reptiles. Michael Lee at the South Australian Museum used a statistical analysis of all the animal's anatomical characteristics and found that the 150-million-year-old flying critter was almost certainly the first ever avian animal, owing to how its wings worked, the spacing between its teeth, and the shape of its vertebrae. In the 150 years since its discovery, archaeopteryx had been considered the first bird, and helped add weight to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution because of its similarities to both birds and reptiles. That is, until July of this year, when Chinese researchers uncovered a chicken-like fossil that they determined was a dinosaur. Xiaotingia Zhengi, the small fossil, so closely resembled the archaeopteryx that biologists temporarily re-classified it as a dinosaur, too. But the new study, published today in the journal Biology Letters, puts it back in the bird family.