On second thought...

So, maybe birds didn't "come from dinosaurs" after all. Oh, there's a connection all right, but maybe not the one we've thought. New research appearing in The Proceedings of the National Academy and summarized at Science Daily adds weight to the idea that birds may have shared a common ancestor with the dinosaurs, but then proceeded down down their own evolutionary road. It goes further than that, though. It appears that, rather than dinosaurs being ancestral to birds, some of the most romanticized of the "dinosaurs" might actually be glorified flightless birds. It's a group you all know about - the raptors.

There's been a long debate regarding the origin of flight in birds that can be summarized as "ground-up" versus "tree-down". The ground-up proponents have held that flight originated when rapid little runners were able to get airborne, while the tree-down group postulate a gliding ancestry for today's fliers.

Recent fossils, particularly the "microraptor" described in 2003, have lent weight to the gliding hypothesis. Tests have revealed that the animals body would not have lent itself to powered flight, but could have managed well as a glider. The researchers believe that such animals could have given rise to flying birds, some descendants of which may have given up flight at a later date to become the raptors.

Put's Velociraptor in a whole new light.