You’ve probably heard that over the course of evolution dinosaurs eventually turned into birds. That’s a sound scientific theory backed by plenty of evidence, but now scientists may have found the smoking gun with regards to that, the missing link between dino and modern day avians.
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00:00 You've probably heard that over the course of evolution, dinosaurs eventually turned
00:07 into birds.
00:08 That's a sound scientific theory backed by plenty of evidence.
00:11 But now scientists may have found the smoking gun with regards to that.
00:14 The missing link between dino and modern day avians.
00:17 The evidence is a dinosaur fossil, one that is described as being a dinosaur skeleton
00:22 with aspects that are considerably bird-like.
00:24 What's more, it's 30 million years older than even the oldest bird fossils.
00:28 The discovery was found in a fossil bed in southeastern China and is just a couple of
00:32 feet long.
00:33 The creature also had feathers, something akin to modern day birds.
00:36 They're calling the creature Fugienvenator prodigiosus, and this is an artist's rendition
00:41 of what it could have looked like.
00:43 The researchers say that at some point this creature went in a different direction from
00:46 the rest of dinosaur kind, with the team writing in the study, "Fugienvenator is an odd species
00:51 that diverged from this main trajectory and evolved bizarre hindlimb architecture."
00:55 They add that the one downside to the discovery was that the feet were not well preserved,
00:59 meaning they still need more fossils to confirm this missing link.
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