Steve Brusatte

It has big wings.

It has a wishbone.

It has hollowed-out bones, just like birds today, but it still has teeth in its jaws.

It has long, sharp claws on its hands.

It has a long, skinny, bony tail.

It's very much a half-reptile, half-bird.

But it could fly.

It was essential to Darwin's theory of evolution.

It was one of the fossils that really proved evolution to the masses back in the 1860s and 1870s.

And it remains today still the oldest known bird in the fossil record.

We have enough fossils of dinosaurs in different stages of this transition that we can see, generally speaking, how evolution took a dinosaur and turned it into a bird.

And the thing that's immediately clear is that this didn't happen quickly.

It was gradual.

It was a long process.

So where did these come from?

Feathers have basically evolved from something like a scale.

You can tweak a feather in a bird as it's growing in an embryo and actually turn it into a scale or vice versa.

And you see this when you look at a chicken, you know, his body is covered in feathers, but look at those scaly feet.

So there is this intimate relationship between feathers and scales.

We now know from the genetics birds are more closely related to crocodiles than crocodiles are to lizards or snakes or turtles.