Crouching turkey, hidden dragon

Like us, birds stand on two legs. But unlike us they 'crouch'. To explain this odd posture, scientists at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK looked at the ancestors of birds: dinosaurs. They made 3D models of various dinosaur taxa including Tyrannosaurus and the bird-like Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx. In this video, see how the models were made and what they show us about the evolution of bird locomotion and flight.

Read the research paper: Linking the evolution of body shape and locomotor biomechanics in bird-line archosaurs

Nature, 24 April 2013