I think this is heady addition to the argument whether or not dinosaurs evolved in to birds. That’s the only way birds could have evolved. An interesting point of note, concerning this, is the discovery of a bird-sized fossil of something called an archeopteryx in Europe. The on-line Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) shows a picture of a model of an archeopteryx at the Oxford University Museum. The specimen exhibits both reptilian and avian characteristics dating back 155 million years. I feel that if archeopteryx was a truly airborne predator, though, it would have perished with the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the pteradon.
When the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred 65 million years ago, science attributed it to the impact of an asteroid south of the Yucatan peninsula. It caused environmental change similar to those of a nuclear winter that some scientists have described. Vast stretches of cloud cover impenetrable by sunlight, cold temperatures and radioactive iridium dust mixed with vast amounts of soot from the burning forests and erupting volcanoes already clogging the lungs of some of the dinosaurs. The airborne predator’s wouldn’ t be able to see to hunt, or metabolize the necessary proteins for life.
I can’t cite any dates of the kinds of dusts that have floated around during our 4.5 billion year evolution, except geologists have traced specific soil samples from the Yellowstone Basin caldera and attributed it to the death’s of dinosaurs in the mid-western, USA. But, even through these near-extinction events, life survived to become as we known it today.
Entering the food chain in the DNA of the virus and bacteria responsible for the decay of dead bodies eaten by scavengers, the dinosaurs also survived in the newly emerging mammals. This radioactively (from iridium and other stuff) mutated reptilian protein most certainly found it’s way into mankind’s DNA.
My instinctual answer to whether birds are evolved from lizards is yes. This is based on the many stories that form the basis of our collective history. That same answer is also based in good, logical, scientific research.
One only needs to accept the theory of convergent evolution, a current topic of discussion. If birds didn’t evolve from dinosaurs, then we need to examine the presence in recent history of the coelacanth, thought to be extinct, taken off Madagascar in 1938, and our gravials, alligators and crocodiles, and ask from where did they evolve from? We really need to examine our selves.
I can only believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs. It’s only a matter of microbiology.
