LONDON (Reuters) — The earliest birds did not have strong enough feathers to take to the air by flapping their wings and were gliders at best, researchers said Thursday.

While modern birds have feathers with a strong central shaft that is hollow to reduce weight, the earliest-known bird Archaeopteryx and another ancient ancestor had feathers that were much thinner and weaker.

Robert Nudds of the University of Manchester and Gareth Dyke of University College Dublin calculated in a report in the journal Science that even if their feather shafts were solid, they would still have been barely strong enough to allow gliding.

Archaeopteryx lived in the late Jurassic period, about 140 million years ago, and Confuciusornis in the early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago.

It is widely believed among paleontologists that the first birds arose from small, feathered dinosaurs.
One theory is that birds evolved from small dinosaurs living in trees that initially used feathers to control their descent like a parachute, then glided through the forest canopy and eventually flapped their wings to achieve true flight.

DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) — Dinosaur footprints up to 1.2 meters (four feet) in diameter have been found in an area of Patagonia known as Argentina's “Jurassic Park,” a scientist said recently.

Jorge Calvo of the National University of Comahue said the footprints are “sauropod dinosaur tracks of different sizes,” and were “in good condition.”

The scientist estimated that the footprints found “more than 90 million years old.”

The area is considered one of the most important paleontological sites in South America, a region where in 1993 remains were found of the Giganotosaurus carolinii, the largest carnivorous dinosaur in the world.

The footprints were stumbled upon several days ago by a yoga instructor performing exercises in Los Barreales, in Neuquen province in southern Argentina.

FOSSILS FOUND

SAO PAULO (AFP) — Brazilian paleontologists have announced they discovered the well-preserved and near-complete fossils of a pre-dinosaur predator that lived some 238 million years ago.

The creature, a Prestosuchus chiniquensis, was about seven meters (22 feet) long, weighed 900 kilos (one ton) and lived in the Triassic Period (250 to 200 million years ago), paleontologists from the Lutheran University of Brazil said.

A team led by paleontologist Sergio Furtado Cabreira and biologist Lucio Roberto da Silva found the fossils in the town of Dona Francisca, some 260 kilometers (160 miles) from Porto Alegre, the capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.

“It is something that we could never imagine — the quality of preservation and the size of the fossils are sensational,” said Da Silva in a university press statement.