“The wishbone is instrumental for how birds fly today. It's a spring that stores energy in the wings, but that first turns up in small meat-eating dinosaurs that were probably hunting. … The same way that whoever invented the propeller would have had no idea the Wright brothers would put it on a plane. This is what evolution was doing.”
In Our Time (BBC) · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Context
Asked about the long gap between dinosaurs and the first birds, the paleontologist says bird features evolved one at a time, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with flight.
Transcript
…human endeavor to make an aeroplane fly. But the point is, then all of these fossils since the 1990s have filled these gaps both before and after. And they show us that half a bird works. You don't actually have to be a complete pigeon. You can be a flyer with primitive feathers and limited wings.
Do you want to help us out in this 50-million-year gap, Steve?
Yeah, this is a subject I love to talk about because a lot of my PhD work was on this, and I spent all this time, like Mike and Maria, very privileged to be able to go to China and study a lot of these new fossils. And really what they do is when you map these fossils out on the dinosaur family tree, it tells you that story of evolution. And you can kind of see evolution happening like something of a running film in action. And what it shows is this wasn't a hopeful monster situation. A bird was something that emerged very gradually from this one group of dinosaurs over time as piece by piece it evolved feature by feature of modern birds. I mean modern birds have a very distinctive body plan. They're small, they have feathers, they have wings, they're lightweight, they have wishbones, they could fold their arms against their body, hundreds of things that make birds unique among any other living animals. But these fossils show That those things evolved one by one in dinosaurs over time, and usually for reasons that had nothing to do with flight. They were being evolved for other things. So, you know, the wishbone is…
What was the purpose of the feathers?
This is such an interesting area of research, a lot of debate. Now, what fundamentally we know is that these fossils tell us that the first feathers were simple. The first feathers were these downy kind of hair-looking feathers. They were present in dinosaurs like tyrannosaurs and some of the plant…
Maria, because of the plethora of stuff coming from China, mostly and from other places, and because of the massive development in technology, you can even begin to tell what colour the colours that these creatures had. Can you just tell us a bit about that, please?
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