One of the greatest discoveries in the history of Vertebrate Paleontology occurred in Germany, near Solnhofen, in 1860. There was a quarry there with lithographic limestone, limestone rocks formed in lakes, with a very fine sedimentation that allows this rock to separate in slabs. In these rocks, of Jurassic age, a fossil feather appeared . The German paleontologist Hermann Von Meyer described it as a very modern feather, which we call remiges (the feathers that make up the wings of birds) and named it Archeopteryx (meaning ancient wing). A short time later, a fossil of a skeleton with impressions of feathers appeared in the same quarry, which Von Meyer identified with the owner of the feather.
This impressive specimen ended up in the hands of the British Museum, where Richard Owen studied it carefully and considered it a bird that retained embryonic characters. At that time it was believed that birds had appeared at the same time as mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs, at the beginning of the Tertiary. So the discovery of a bird in the Jurassic doubled the age of birds: they had come to coexist with dinosaurs.
Just a year before the discovery of the Archeopteryx feather, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species and with it, had caused quite a stir. But then there were some gaps in Darwin’s ideas, which have been more than filled in ever since. For example, there were no known “ transitional forms ” between groups of living things. And Archeopteryx flew in from the Jurassic rocks to save the day: it had both bird and reptile characteristics, and was therefore revolutionary as direct evidence of the evolutionary process.
In 1877 another specimen was found in Solnhofen, which was acquired by the Berlin Natural History Museum. This specimen is possibly the most spectacular, for being in anatomical connection (this means that the bones were articulated in the same way as they were in the living animal) and with open wings, perfectly showing the wing feathers. Over time, up to 10 specimens of Archeopteryx were found and published. The original feather that gave the genus its name was practically forgotten and its belonging to the specimens of Archeopteryx was considered doubtful. However, in 2020 a detailed study of this feather concluded that it fit perfectly with the variety of feathers known in these birds, with which the cycle was closed: the original feather that gave them their name most likely belonged to the bird itself . Archeopteryx .
Until evolutionary ideas, fossils were considered a mere curiosity, very interesting and curious, but they had no weight. Then, Charles Darwin himself relied on fossils – such as the Pleistocene megafauna – to build his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. He even mentioned the finding of Archeopteryx as evidence for the evolution of birds from reptiles in later reissues of his Origin of Species.
This new dimension acquired by the fossils did not do them the slightest bit of grace to the most conservative religious sectors, who had tried many times to use the fossils as evidence of the Universal Flood. Today there are still creationists – some even call themselves “scientific” creationists even though they do not use the method – who have even tried to ridicule the idea of “transitional forms” by comparing them to unnatural aberrations that could not have existed. For these “neocreationists” the fossil record does not support evolution. But the truth is that the fossil record does not stop confirming it over and over again. Furthermore, we can consider the fossil record to be an illustrated atlas of the evolution of Life on Earth. And Archeopteryx is one of its main actors. And he is not alone: in recent decades we have been able to witness the discovery of many feathered dinosaurs that show that the lineage from dinosaurs to birds is continuous and very well documented. And even that characteristics that we considered purely Avian, had already appeared in our admired dinosaurs, as we saw in another article recently.
References:
Ostrom, JH 1976. Archeopteryx and the origin of birds. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 8(2): 91-182.
Xu, X. et al. 2003. Four-winged dinosaurs from China. Nature, 421(6921): 335-340
Gascó, F. 2021. That was not in my dinosaur history book . Guadalmazán.
