If global warming runs away with its self and a few species survive. Would birds evolve into Tyranosaurus etc?

Highly unlikely, there's far too many thing to evolve into for any specific one to be a likely result.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

On the flip side, given the right conditions and enough time, could some species of bird evolve into a non-feathered, non-flying, land dwelling carnivore, that ran around on two legs, etc., etc. - sure, entirely possible.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Assuming they survive, they will evolve into whatever enables them to survive ... better.

Whatever it is, while it might be scaly and land-dwelling, it won't be a dinosaur.

Lets just hope it is not the chickens they may have a few bones to pick.

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If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

They're birds, not the hulk.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Technically birds evolved from a common ancestor of dinosaurs not dinos themselves.

As for the future, Some birds like the roadrunner and secretary bird already do their hunting and spend most of their time on the ground.
A larger flightless form of one them is *possible* but we can't say it will happen with any kind of certainty.

So if conditions were right, the Dodo could return?

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Birds back into....



They do in the Guiness ad...........

The dodo was the end result of an evolutionary path. Chances are very, very small that a different evolutionary path would arrive at exactly the same dodo.

To illustrate it, you shouldn't picture it as two lines, and when the second line arrives at the end point of the first one, you have again a dodo. You'd be more precise if you'd imagine 10000 blue lines going more or less parallel, forming an aspect of the dodo at their end point. Now imagine 10000 red lines, which grow during evolution, each at their own speed. If these all end exactly at the end points of each equivalent blue line AND do so at the same time, the red line bundle of evolution of a bird (with different starting conditions than those forming the original dodo) also arrived at the dodo. You see that chances are small to say the least.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

yes, I always return to threads I started.

From what i've heard they did evolve from dinosaurs, do you have any evidence to the contrary?

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There is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's all dark - Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon

The top carnivores during the Paleocene (right after the demise of non-avian dinosaurs) were giant flightless birds like Gastornis. In South America prior the formation of the Isthmus of Panama a few million years ago the top carnivores were also giant birds, aptly called terror birds, up to 3 m tall. Being warm-blooded and not that massive, they needed feathers. So it is perfectly possible that such birds reappear again at some point of the future.

Actually, many dinosaurs closely related to birds had feathers. Many maniraptors like the famous Velociraptor were undoubtedly feathered. One ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex was probably also feathered. Some paleontologists have suggested that T. rex babies were downy. Adult T. rex was probably too large to have a feather cover.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Plus it would look as if he was cross-dressing.

Have they found velociraptor fossil outlines showing feathers like they found for ancient birds?

I know they once found a piece of dino skin (don't ask me which one), which was leathery like they presented them. Colours may be off a bit .

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Cool, A discussion I can contribute to. Yes and no. Can't do in the presense of efficient carnivorous placental mammals. Nowhere do the terror birds evolve where there are true canids or felids. And when conditions change that bring them together the birds always fail to thrive and go extinct after a couple of thousand years or so.

Marsupial mammals only have approximately 70% the cranial capacity of an equal massed placental mammal so the birds from South America weren't that pressured by them. IIRC the European terror birds evolved when Europe was a group of big islands.

So yes, if you kill off the local mammals and give them a few tens of thousands of years you could come up with something

A South American beast. The skull on the right is an eagle skull, for comparison

Attached Thumbnails

 

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

I was being imprecise, my fault.
Yes the common ancestor was defined as a dinosaur, just not a T-rex.
I should have said that the dinos most people are *familliar* with
(T-rex, Triceratops, apatosaurus, etc)
were not direct ancestors of birds.

The answer to this bears further discussion.

It is important that you understand that there is no such thing as reverse evolution.
Evolution:
- always moves forward
- has no goal
- knows there are a nigh-infinite number of ways of solving a complex problem


Consider this a lousy analogy but I can't think of any other.

A player bashing balls around on a pool table.

The player ends up with a very interesting combination (five balls in a straight line all touching) all pointing at the far right pocket. He calls this the 'Dodo' configuration.

He goes for lunch. When he comes back, some else has been playing pool and his precious Dodo is lost forever. The only way he could ever hope to get that configuration back is to reverse all the hits of the errant player, but he knows it is impossible to reverse shots.

Alas, he goes back to playing. If he plays long enough, he may create another configuration with five balls touching in a row, but it will never be the Dodo, no matter how much it may coincidentally resemble it.

Except on ST-TNG thanks to Mr. Barkley.
Give yourself a bit more credit. I think it's a great analogy.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

All the above analogies are good. To me, the core idea is that history moves forward only. I know it sounds trite, but it means that when we look back in time we only see the 'branch points' taken, not those possible. The problem is that we are driven to see those as inevitable, not just possible. It's like one of those displays at the science museum where a marble falls down a board with many rows of nails to bounce off. The path of any individual ball is unpredictable in advance, but easy to trace out after it reaches bottom if you recorded which way it bounced each time.

A slightly different question is whether there is a theoretical possibility (sort of a Jurassic Park) that genetic information exists in extant birds to reconstruct dinosaurs (and to those, myself among them, who currently believe that birds ARE dinosaurs, we all know what we're talking about). Both birds and dinosaurs evolved beaks, for example, and all (as far as I know) modern adult birds are toothless, but the genetic capacity for teeth is still present in some birds. On the other claw, mutation of those genes has proceded apace for 65 megayears, so we could only guess what they looked like back in the Mesozoic.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.