How Birds Evolved from Dinosaurs

Birds are the last living branch of the theropod dinosaurs. This film explains how a family tree is drawn from shared traits, follows the evidence from Archaeopteryx in 1861 and Huxley's comparisons to the feathered dinosaurs found in China since 1996, shows how feathers may have evolved in stages before flight, and finds wishbones, air-filled bones and brooding on nests in dinosaurs that were not birds. It covers the shrinking of the bird line, the four-winged Microraptor, the competing ideas for how flight began, and why only beaked birds came through the extinction 66 million years ago, starting from Yuezhuornis, a 150-million-year-old early bird described in 2026 as probably flightless.

The dinosaurs that never died out

How birds evolved from dinosaurs.

A family tree

Birds sit inside the dinosaurs.

The first bird

A feather in a German quarry.

Feathered dinosaurs

A fuzzy fossil from north-east China.

How a feather grew

From a hollow tube to a flight feather.

Bird parts before birds

Wishbones, air sacs and nests.

Smaller, then airborne

Shrinking bodies, new wings.

The survivors

Why only beaked birds came through.

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