What made scientists think birds and reptiles were related?

Answer 1

Scientist think that birds are related to dinosaurs because as you study the fossilised bones of certain therapod dinosaurs especially dromaeosaurs you start to notice many similarities between them and modern day birds.

The famous archeopteryx for example, which is historically considered the first bird, looked very much like a bird but still had claws on its wings and had a mouth full of teeth. Other dinosaurs from the same time period look even more like birds.

In fact experiments done on modern day bird embryos show that if you play around with the genes of birds you can engineer dinosaur features such as teeth, long dinosaur tails etc.

All the key features that people associate with birds developed when they were still dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had feathers, dinosaurs had oval shaped eggs, dinosaurs had beaks.

The morphology of birds is so similar to some dinosaurs that scientist are starting to consider birds as not just related to dinosaurs but actually as avian dinosaurs.

Answer 2

they lay eggs like reptiles and the bone structure is very similar to some dinosaurs 93,000,000 years ago. scientists believe some dinosaurs had feathers too, so its not really that hard to see

Answer 3

Raptors or beast-footed dinosaurs had claws similar to the claws of birds. Both birds and reptiles have scales. Transitional species like archaeopteryx had feathers.

Answer 4

But they did. Specifically, birds evolved from a subgroup of dinosaurs (which were reptiles) known as theropods. There is a lot of fossil and anatomical evidence for this.

Answer 5

they both lay eggs