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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2024
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To look at the evolution of modern bird feathers, we must start a long time ago, with the dinosaurs from whence they came. We see early incarnations of feathers on dinosaur fossils, and remnants of dinosaurs in a bird's wish bone. Carl Zimmer explores the stages of evolution and how even the reasons for feathers have evolved over millions of years.
Lesson by Carl Zimmer, animation by Armella Leung.
I wonder what other forms feathers tried to take that didn't work out.
Look up Yi qi, Yutyrannus or Epidexipteryx
Although they aren't feathers, there are quills of ceratopsians, and imagine all the other amazing possibilities that sauropods and other ornithischians could have possessed that we haven't found yet. There's still so much to discover!
ok but we can all stop arguing and appreciate the art of the animation? that was so. beautiful.
no
I agree with you
Look at all these videos from Ted Ed, someone always comments on the animation style, it's annoying at this point.
@@charleshicks604 ok this was 4 years ago. I'm sorry you ran into mine?
@Joshua George lol
Thank you educators and animators and everyone who did this, it helps not just me but everyone who watches you
I actually find feathered dinosaurs to make evolutionary sense.
For example, dinosaurs like Raptors and Troodon, found in cold climates, would have needed feathers to keep out the biting chill of the brutal Winters. Most of them were too small by Dino Standards to insulate themselves. Thus, feathers were an absolute necessity for them.
In terms of oviraptors, like Citipati, found in the Gobi desert of Mongolia, they seem to have used the feathers to either intimidate an opponent or predator or attract a mate.
Finally, we come to Microraptor, Sinornithosaurus, and Rahonavis. These three evolved feathers for one thing only. Flight. For Microraptor and Sinornithosaurus, it wasn't even powered flight, but gliding. When it comes to Microraptor, it didn't have the muscles for powered flight. So, it made the most of its four wings. By holding its rear legs back, Microraptor had the ability to travel through the forest in a series of long looping glides. The bad thing was that once on the ground the long feathers turn from an advantage into weakness. Microraptor was barely able to walking, much less run. Which made it and easy target for ground base predators.
Before the discovery of Yutyrannus, scientists didn't know if such huge dinosaurs would have or need feathers, but like with all these other examples makes evolutionary sense. Which is shown today by birds.
+Dennis Taylor
Raptors? xD you mean dromaeosauridae
Kevin Lobo Aye. Don't ask me why I still call them that. I know it's really dromaesaurs.
Dennis Taylor Jurassic Park?
+Kevin Lobo and the crazy part is, I've never really been a fan of the series. Especially when it comes to the dromaeosaurs.
Dennis Taylor microraptor could walk and run just fine. What's wrong with it. BBC or national geographic? XD
So in short, feathers evolved when these early birds were threatened and they used their "wings" to get more speed for the running. Then the ones who got longer arms and bigger feathers, survived longer because they were able to escape the predators. At some time they had so long arms and big feathers that they could glide a short distance, but not yet able to fly. And this eventually led to flying.
Does this explanation sound anyhow plausible? At least for me it does.
Nikke95 threatened?
....
threatened by extinction, yes.
Not just from predators but to get on top of places lol
@Nikke95 not exactly. Follow articles by Dial, K & Heers (et al.) if you're interested in the subject of origins of bird flight. Their articles (based on a unique locomotion coined "WAIR (wing assisted incline running)") are fascinating, casing bright light on that mystery!
nowadays we know that feathers are ancestral to ornithodira.aka, the clade that includrs all dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
I've never looked at feathers closely before. This video clip makes me appreciate the feathers when I found one now. It was truly interesting to learn about the history of feathers.
All hail his cheesiness the Flying Spaghetti Monster that allowed evolution to exist Amen 🙏
ALL HAIL!!!
@@NabPunk OK! OK!
Ramen
What religion is this I need to be in this.
Amen
@@jessica.m.thornhill2300 *Ramen
Well, it's no surprise that this video would get attacked by creationist trolls with nothing better to do with their lives. Attacking science is all they really know how to do since they can't use it to support their own position, but I digress.
I'm not a huge fan of the incline model for feather evolution. I prefer the tree-down model in which arboreal theropods that originally used their feathers for insulation and mating display were able to use their feathers to lessen their falls which would lead to gliding and ultimately powered flight. Mircroraptor was a good example of this kind of adaptation and transition.
10 points for imagination, zero for observation. Life only comes from life, reptiles only produce reptiles, 100 percent observable, no imagination required.
+Ian9toes
Diapsids only produce more diapsids. Birds are still diapsids just like nearly all modern reptiles with the exception of turtles that are anapsids. Being diapsids just further confirms that birds, crocodilians, lizards and snakes share common ancestry. It's impossible to look at the whole taxonomic tree and not find nodes that connect one form of life to another.
And if life only comes from life, then where did the FIRST life come from? That's where abiogenesis comes into play which is a completely separate field from evolution.
DINOSAURS HAD FEATHERS BUT PROTOFEATHERS
I'm think the animal had to be small and use its arms significantly in a manner that demands strength over long durations like moving quickly through trees or just running on fours. Perhaps it was chasing small things or was being chased, either way the animal could get thrust as it ran making evolution favor longer feathers. Like you said females may have seen longer feather as desirable how ever this tends to create gender dimorphism so if its the case this would only really get males to fly, or at least fly sooner if that's the case.
Then after awhile it would be sufficient enough to glide and the determinate of who is fittest was which could glide farthest. After the necessary changes have occurred by these means all it really needs to do is have the instinct to flap which could have easily been established if it was getting thrust by running in specific way.
ive always thought that flight was originally evolved like that, from an arboreal dinosaur that glided down to the floor onto their prey and eventually took off. however my zoology professor told me that the running and leaping from the floor and then taking off from the ground had more evidence and back up. is this true or are they equally valid?
One of the best TED animations, really talented artist!
Evolution is mindboggling. Even now, when we know it so well, there's still a sense of magic to it, some things we will never know for sure.
Well what good is half a wing? Well, look at cars, particularly high performance cars, those have very crude wings on them, spoilers. These can have a huge effect on the handling of a car. Since the 1930's Car designers have realised how important aerodynamics are even for vehicles which ostensibly get all their control from the wheels.
Small simple wings are very useful for a small creature needing to move fast with manoeuvrability.
Traits can server more than one purpose and increase in importance over time.
TheThinkingApeMan That's very true, I was only pointing out one practical aspect.
You are right that really helps in understanding evolution is the fact that genes and phenotypes to not influence success in isolation. All together contribute to overall chances in all sorts of ways.
1:04 HEY! sinosauropteryx! i love that dinosaur!
The animation was so cute ♡
I knew this already but my friends really hate when I saw dinosaurs are birds. So I'm going to show it to them. Can't wait The looks on there faces.
SAME!! XD
Your friends are morons.
It’s actually the fact that birds are dinosaurs. All birds are dinosaurs but not all dinosaurs are birds, if that makes sense
Actually, taxonomically speaking, we are direct descendants of fishes, and are hence ourselves fishes. No wonder that people don't like it when you say that birds are dinosaurs, because we can also be called many things, but practically speaking, we are not those things.
...I think you need smarter friends xDDD
Ah, i think one explanation for the evolution of the wing and tail feathers, is that early dinosaurs may have used these winged tails and arms to provide stability while running. This explains why this high surface area feature, the feather, would be beneficial. Instead of growing a long, fleshy, metabolically-expensive tail, evolution favored using cheap and long lasting highly efficient materials, and used the power of fractals, which further compress the alterations needed to be made to DNA.
I really wich we could see dinosaurs in their feathery beauty :')
from being on top of food chain evolve to middle of food chain
The top of the food chain died off and was replaced.
@@NabPunkIt could also be taken over
Can I watch one intellectual video about science without ignorant creationists ruining it?
Archaeopteryx? (Sorry if I spelled it wrong) Please like so it's not lost in the sea of comments..
I liked this lesson much more than I expected. Thank you.
I've been wanting to know this for ages. Thanks TED.
That animation is gorgeous
"Accident of physics .." Could have been named bits better. Yes, that discovery might have been fortuitous, but only through trained eyes!
Running on incline in video misinterpreted the mechanism that those feathered creatures (or chicks of some of extant taxa) exercised. Lift force generated by wing stroke there is contrary to normal flight is used to increase traction on the substrate. It's called WAIR (wing assisted incline running), which is a vital clue on the subject of origins of bird flight.
One of the clearest explanations I've seen for feather evolution.
Im also interested in the evolution of beaks. Are they fused teeth or just hardened lips? Did some dinosaurs decide to be vegan and try to eat seeds and nuts and those with prototype beaks survived more than those whose snouts are not into picking and plucking?
I guess it’s both?
Same thing could be true for running dinosaurs.
Maybe they used their feathers to control their running trajectory like modern sportcars do.
I imagine they could've easily had an evolutionary edge over others by making tighter turns or glide jumping to catch a prey.
2:15 “okay, rude”
Think of evolution as an process like growing up. You couldn't tell me the exact date, when you suddenly looked like an adult - like "yesterday I looked like a child, but today I look grown up". Yet, when you look at old photos of yours, you can clearly see that you have changed over time. Same thing with evolution, you can't see it in action, but you can see that things changed compared to the past.
I found it fascinating how closely related we are to each other. Feathers and fur are related to each other, but feathers just happen to be a more complex version of fur. It'd be interesting if some dinosaurs evolved to have feathers to run up mountains, while some got fur to keep warm.
It's interesting thinking what might've happened if our world hadn't had mountains and feathers never came to be. Flight would've been never thought of and consider impossible humanly and biologically. Actually, we'd probably have planes shaped like bugs instead of birds though, ha ha, if birds never existed.
Dynocation all of this happened thanks to one single fish
Valia 2305 ohai
how are they related? i thought they didn't evolve from a single ancestor, but rather appeared independently in different groups, and are thereforre products of analogous evolution. makes sense on why theropods have feathers and mammals have fur, and those are unique to those groups.
You forgot bats.
1:34 me when someone stares at me and then tantalises my eyes in return
The animation in this is absolutely beautiful.
Wow! Beautiful animation and an excellent, concise lecture. Keep Zimmer and Leung on board, I'd love to see more of their work.
AWESOME ART STYLE! LOVE IT!
So well animated.
that 2:15-2:20 clip was so cute!
The animation for this is brilliant. It provides very elegant visualizations of evolutionary processes. Thanks!
why are there creationists here?
because they have nothing better to do than maliciously attack anything they disagree with.
They're compelled to try to convince other people to accept their religion because they get brownie points with their deity for "saving souls."
They have to prove to themselves that they are right.
...you hit the nail on the head; understood me better than I did myself I think. :)
" It certainly seems more likely a route to flight for the descendants of Microraptor."
The whole point is that there is no 'route' towards anything. Each intermittent aspect of the feather development must be either beneficial or at least benign in it's own way. Nor are Speed Gain and Tree Down hypotheses mutually exclusive. Both of these hypotheses could be simultaniously true, as well as others such as thermal insulation and courtship ritual.
and continually warp an animal and it no longer looks the same and is so different from its ancestors we classify it as a new species. that is evolution in your own words.
thanks to the asteroid we have KFC fried chicken.
i look at birbies in all their magnificent forms and i can't fathom how some people *don't* see dinosaurs
soo my chicken is a dinosaur?
yes
Beep beep im a sheep, meow meow im a cow, rawr rawr im a dino-saur
Absolutely. Your chicken is more closely related to a velociraptor than a T-Rex was to an Allosaurus.
that's my frustration, too. The creationists not only jumpoed on Lamark's hypothesis, they also distorted a Time Mag article about bacterial genetics crossing over as a mutual exchange. They interpreted it as something that doesn't apply. It was maddening to me.
yes, I credit my maker, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, He is the beginning and the end!
This is the correct reasoning behind everything in evolutionary biology.
Obviously God put those fossilized feathers in the ground to test our faith.
CountBifford Don't be sarcastic - it was obviously the devil that did it.
This is a learning channel pls dont spread that shit here
+CountBifford God is real
+Joy Santos Which one?
+Heather Spoonheim All of them
Beautifully done.
LOOK WHAT JESUS DID, LOOK WHAT JESUS DID!
Myths and misconceptions about evolution - Alex Gendler ¬_¬
..
Ral Crux did you take that seriously sir? lol
Oh, you got me D:
Hating on Christianity or Christians?
It is not okay to mock people's beliefs.
There is as much evidence for how dinosaurs became birds as there is about Jesus being a god. Lets just chill.
damn good video.hope more info comes out of reasearch.
so dragons are real?? :D !
that means dragons could have existed right?
Awesome!! think of all the possibilities *-*
Sort of...?
Yes, dinosaurs are lizards, flying lizards are obviously dragons...
Bryan Davis yeah but we somehow always thought of dragons as something fictional . lol .. Flying lizards are awesome.
but not the traditional bat wings
Well, you can think of flying lizards or flying snakes, or pterosaurs or even flying dinosaurs, as the early birds. They are all some kind of flying dragons. But do a dragon needs to fly? Legendary dragons are often magnificent, enormous and heavy land reptiles, like all dinosaurs and relatives ^^
If you'd actually googled Surtsey you would have seen that it looks like a recent volcanic island with patches of grass on it. Sea birds started nesting on it, they carried seeds in their stomaches, etc. There's nothing else to see there.
I don't believe in evolution, but i'll gladly listen to what you believe in.
No reason to think evolution has stopped. It just takes millions of years to have significant effects most of the time, so one can't expect to observe evolution over their lifespan.
I love your channel,makes me understand more than teachers
Very interesting. Beautiful graphics as well :)
i wonder how the 1st dinosaur figured out that flapping it's wings would help it run faster
"Warm blooded" and "cold blooded" are very minor differences, actually, and the line between them blurred by many animals. They're not really considered very hard scientific terms anymore.
'coming back to TED' is almost like 'coming back to senses' .. dammm it opens it all... cool stuff!!
As the man said, Dinosaurs had feathers for Millions of years before they could fly, so the arm flapping thing makes sense as an intermediate behavior between running and flying, and if it helped them run faster, then it would have helped them avoid predators, speeding up the evolutionary process. (More survivors = more mutations = better chances that one of them will fly.)
Dude, you're blowing my mind...
If you want to know what 'after your life' is like - remember what it was like before your life.
What if we humans start running uphill with our hands spread out, maybe in the next 50 million years, our arm hair can turn into feathers too and let us fly 😊😇
good job...short but clear
This is BIG cool! I love the animation!!
Thank you for your quick reply. I was actually wondering if there is a physical limit, like how there is a limit to how big mammals can be on earth.
We are seeing an upper limit right now, in the form of whales. From what we've been able to find, the blue whale is the largest animal to have ever existed
Yes, true. The downstroke developed as an attribute of advanced flying. But my point was that Mesozoic birds, unlike bird groups since the Eocene, had significant anatomical differences from post-Mesozoic avians-- principally the absence of the triosseal canal, anatomically a structural adaptation which makes the full downward beat of the wings possible. So, it's stretching it more than a bit to cite "wing-assisted climbing" as a stage in the evolution of full-powered flight.
Great short: well presented, interesting information and superb animation. Thanks
that's why these fossils are found in several different layers, and not, if the flood happened, in one single layer. correct?
While there is no pre-determined route towards anything, there was some singular or multi-faceted route that led to avian flight. That is to what I'm referring. I know the video is about the possible influences of the evolution of feathers, but my previous comment was referring to the evolution of flight, not feathers.
I'd love to hear about how other animals started what led to flight, like bats and insects. What would a proto-bat-wing or proto-dragonfly-wing look like?
This is my opinion, and theory, that bats were actually avian at some point, but evolved into mammals
Or maybe bats were mamals that has duck-feet like hands and decide they wanna fly and bam, batman, oops, i mean, bats
if anyone wants to teach me about the history of moths go right ahead
@@sillygoosetaur
That sounds awesome.
@@dudep504That isn’t how evolution works… you can’t “evolve” into a mammal. You have to be a synapsid to be the first mammals, everything after that wouldn’t count as mammals.
we're learning about feathers and birds in my Zoology and Environmental science classes
I like the mixture of animations
Evolution is a beautiful thing
So basically, flight was just a bug in physics that eventually became exploited enough to form a viable niche
exactly
I don't know why your comment got flagged as spam when you're asking a valid question.You were correct in that evolution can be and is a spontaneous mutation of the individual. However one mutation will rarely produce a dramatic change like growing an extra pair of wings. In the case of this video, the first generation has spiky feathers, but each generation will produce more branches until you get the feather we have today. That's what people mean by evolution is a long term process. Cont.
I love how the narrator speaks
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed.
That's some good storytelling.
7 years early!
P.S 979th comment!
Such a wonderful video! Thank you)
I believe fuzzy proto-feather-type-things would have been present in almost every species of dinosaur for far longer than 115 mil years ago. I would say that dinosaurs developed insulating follicles at the beginning of their evolution as far back as 260 mil years ago. And a lot of people forget about the mammalian-reptile animals that ruled for over a hundred million years before the dinosaurs showed up but after the age of reptiles. They were also likely to sport a huge diversity of follicles
Hey, fancy meeting you here :)
Good job, you jinxed it!
The big ones died out, because after the impact, food was scarce and they needed a lot of it to power their large bodies, thus only the little ones lived on, since they were able to survive on much less food than the big ones. Hope this answeres your question.
A few individuals mutating would not have caused a change at that scale and even if they did just sprout wings one day, they would still have to develop a lighter bone structure and the muscle power to move their wings before getting anywhere near flying.
Personally I prefer the trees-down theory of the evolution of flight over the ground-up theory illustrated here
Yeah, but see that's what I was trying to say, "this activity would have created a demand for larger wings" does sound like Lamarck, like saying that giraffes, the classical example, were trying to get better leaves from the top of trees and the demand for larger necks made them what they are today, or maybe I'm just mixing stuff
first time seeing the extended intro
Thank you for posting this. Very interesting.
I often wondered about this. It still seems a bit far-fetched to me, though, that wings were used to run up hills. It seems more likely that some smaller bird-like dinosaurs simply used wings to glide between trees or high cliffs in basically the same way as a flying squirrel.
Well, I can picture them escaping up tree trunks. Even then, using forelimbs for climbing seems more efficient. So I would agree with you, gliding seems more plausible, as does the idea that the added air resistance cushioned falls, which would have been useful for tree-nesting species (or rather their offspring).
great vid - keep 'em coming!
That was the first thing i thought too!
You are correct. Ground up = impossible. Also, this stuff about wing strokes powering a running creature up a slope as an antecedent of flight is an attempt to save the appearance of this orthodoxy. But only a modern bird is structurally capable of making such a downward stroke! Anyway, as entrenched as all this is, there are some (like me) who find too many problems with the birds-are-dinosaurs claim.
Not trying to be annoying or anything and correct me if I'm wrong, but saying that dinosaurs started flapping their arms to run faster, then with time they started flying sounds a little bit like Lamarck, it would be better to say that a mutation happened and some dinosaurs started developing feathers on their arms and they started using it for flying.
This video showed how 'flight' evolved, BUT NOT HOW FEATHERS EVOLVED!
from 1:12 to 1:17 and from 2:12 to 3:03
I disagree. For a 3.5 minute video, it does a great job illustrating feather evolution. To address your points:
1) There are multiple competing hypotheses. The video offers several plausible ones, but does not claim to be exhaustive.
2) I assume you mean gliding (mentioned in the video) rather than hovering.
3) There's actually reason to believe feathers did not evolve from scales (feathers are hollow and made from different material). Regardless, evolution and origin are separate questions.
True, that. I think it was the last comment -- "Only then, perhaps 50m yrs. after the first wiry feathers evolved, did feathers lift those dinosaurs into the sky" -- that gave me the feeling.
Btw, I'm not saying he meant that. I'm just saying that I felt a *slight* implication there. Really slight.