Dinosaurs most likely had flight-ready brains before they ever soared through the air.
It's a common myth that birds have extremely small brains; this is not true at all. In fact, they have large brains in relation to their body size, a NYIT press release reported.
"A close connection today doesn't mean that the brain and fly behavior evolved together as an integrated system," Assistant Professor Gaberiel Bever, Ph.D., of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, said. "Our study establishes that dinosaurs had these big brains before they could fly. Before they took to the air, they had a flight-ready brain: a brain with the neuronal capacity needed to navigate a three-dimensional space."
A research team from the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and the University of Texas used a computer program to create high-resolution models of the 100-million-year old Archaeopteryx's brain.
"We not only looked at the brain as a whole but we were able to divide the brain up into its different regions," Bever said. "That allowed us to estimate how those different regions changed relative to each other, not only to body size. The forebrain is where a lot of the action occurs."
The researchers hope to learn even more about the development of ancient bird brains.
"It's a difficult question to answer why anatomical structures evolved originally. How they are used by living creatures often doesn't tell you the whole story" Bever said. "We're still working on what factors may have been driving the original enlargement of the bird brain. But it doesn't appear to be flight or the requirements of flight. That brain was in place before flight."
The Archaeopteryx is widely considered to be the oldest-known bird.
Researchers at the University of Manchester recently discovered the bird had light-colored feathers, with a dark outer-rim. They had recently believed they bird was all black. They made the conclusion by studying ancient pigment from a single fossilized feather, a press release reported.
