The Early History of Theropods

Extract

Theropods have traditionally been portrayed as extinct bipedal predators built along the lines of such celebrated terrors as Tyrannosaurus, Deinonychus, and Allosaurus. The earliest theropods indeed fit that image, and all of them are decidedly extinct. However, it has become increasingly apparent that living birds trace their genealogy to those extinct theropods (Ostrom, 1976; Gauthier, 1986; Gauthier and Padian, 1985 and this volume), and that any adequate consideration of the evolutionary history of Theropoda must assess the lineage as a whole, instead of arbitrarily focusing on the Mesozoic forms alone. When the approximately 8,600 living avian descendants of the ancestral theropod are taken into account, together with the various extinct Mesozoic and Cenozoic taxa, theropods display a far greater range of size, form, behavior, and diet than we ever pictured in our traditional image.