Clades are always fuzzy things around the edges, but new papers are saying archaeopteryx belongs on the theropod (dinosaur) side of the fuzzy line.
Here’s a report on the new paper from Nature.
Short version - new discoveries of theropods in China show that previously thought ‘bird-unique’ qualities were not.
I’m not surprised. Ever since I first heard about feathered theropods, I’ve wondered when A was going to be relegated to their ranks. Although I’m certainly no expert, no breastbone and apparently flightless means “dinosaur” to me.
(Yes, yes, I know moas and emus and kiwis and that big thing with the O name are flightless birds.)
Not surprising. We may never find the ancestor of modern birds among the variations of feathered dino-ish creatures. Archy and the Chinese feathered friends are surely related to the modern birds, but who knows what the line of descent was. The first ‘bird’ was probably quite small, and possibly living in an environment that is no longer accessible. We only know about these finds from the chance deaths of the animals over some mud flats that fossilized their remains.
Not surprising, but sad. *Archie *was still an important find, and came at just the right time (just a couple of years after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published).
I still get sentimental over Pluto, too.
I wonder if this will affect the ‘ground up vs. tree down’ debate?
“first bird” was always too specific a label to apply to any fossil.
The most important fact is that A. will fit right into our understanding of the evolutionary process and as a result of these recent findings we will know more and be able to refine the model.
science marches on.
True enough, but if Archie moves to the dinosaur side of the line, there’s an excellent chance he’ll no longer even be a direct ancestor of birds - some other chain of species could easily lead from ancestor of bird to proto-bird to obviously bird without ever going through archeopteryx.
Right, it’s more likely that Archie is a grand-uncle rather than grandfather of modern birds. In fact it’s hard to pick out any fossil species as being a true ancestor of any modern species.
Suddenly, all those BC comics become irrelevant.
Is anyone left on the ‘ground up’ side?
What’s wrong with the ‘ground up’ version? It’s always been the one that made sense to me, even though I’m basing it solely on my observations of my pet birds attempting to scale couches and the random Discovery Channel documentary on the ‘debate’.
Archie was never the direct ancestor of modern birds, really. It was considered a close relative of that ancestor, however. This paper removes even that distinction, but keep in mind that there is sill a big “if” involved: “If this new phylogenetic hypothesis can be confirmed by further investigation, current assumptions regarding the avialan ancestral condition will need to be re-evaluated.” So, we’ll have to wait and see.
Really, this has been a false dichotomy for some time, and not really a useful question anyway; neither proposal is testable. The real question is simply “how did the flight stroke evolve”.
So are today’s birds effectively the last dinosaurs, or not?
Surely you mean Archie comics? 
They are considered dinosaurs, yes. Whether they are the “last” dinosaurs remains to be seen 
I’d say that although not testable, given the current evidence, both methods provide plausible paths to powered flight. Of course what we all crave is more about the intermediate steps which, eventually, will allow us to be more and more certain about the actual path taken.
It’s all a matter of definitions. To quote a paleontologist interviewed by Swedish public radio this morning: “If we define a bird as an animal with feathers, then it is one”. The interviewer tried to add “and flies”, but was promptly reminded of ostriches and their ilk.
Ornithologist?
…and now, my 5h grade teacher has to fail me (31 years after the fact) on my science presentation on “the First Bird”.
Damn!
GROAN
As high a profile case as Archaeopteryx is, I can’t fucking wait until the creationist shitheads intentionally misunderstand this and start their inevitable HAW-HAWing.