The Archaeopteryx, as old as 150 million years, has long been
thought of as the first bird.
Now, the American Museum of Natural
History's Mark Norell, along with a
team of scientists, has unearthed new
information about the winged animal.
The first Archaeopteryx specimens started to
appear in the 1860s shortly
after the Origin of Species appeared
and immediately it was seized on by Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin and others as a
transitional form, because here in fact
was something which was
clearly birdlike, in the sense that it
had
modern sorts of feathers, it had wings, it
had all those attributes, but it retained a lot
of more primitive dinosaurian features, like a long tail, like teeth, like claws on
the front, on the front hands, or on
the hands, and so it was a dead
immediate between these two major groups of animals. Norell and partner Greg Erickson
set out to discover just how deep the
similarities between the Archaeopteryx and
modern birds actually ran.
Well if Archaeopteryx really is a bird than it should have a
bird like physiology of very very rapid
growth,
so the question that Greg Erickson and
I wanted to answer was well did it
grow that way or did it grow like a non-avian dinosaur grows. To answer that
question Norell's team was given a rare
opportunity to dig further into one 
of ten known Archaeopteryx specimens. We were able to take minute
pieces off of the Munich specimen, which is this
specimen right here,
off of the bones, and then making thin sections of those
bones and analyzing them, we were able to
calculate how fast this animal grew.
After analyzing the fossil, Norell determined the Archaeopteryx was not the first
bird, rather a feathered dinosaur,
meaning the transition between dinosaurs
and true birds happened much later. 
We have a long way to go before we understand, you know, when this transition actually occurred,
but what we can say now is, just as Archaeopteryx is a  morphological
immediate, in the sense that it has a long tail and teeth and feathers, between
traditional dinosaurs and birds,
it's also physiological immediate as
well because it's growing toward the
fast end of traditional dinosaurs, but
much slower than  living dinosaurs,
which are birds, so that, you know,
it is this perfect immediate and that
it's really becoming blurry now, what you
call a bird and what you call a feathered dinosaur.
One of the big questions now and stuff is that maybe there's more than one species of
Archeopteryx, perhaps the and the Solnhofen and London specimens are
different species than the specimens in Eichstatt, Munich, and Thermopolis.
And  with these new findings, Norell still remains certain
that birds are directly related to
dinosaurs. All the evidence, and I say, all the
evidence points out that,
that birds are intimitely tied to dinosaurs, so much so in fact that
just like humans are a kind of primate,
birds are a kind of dinosaur, and our
study
shows that even more because it
shows that, you know, Archaeopteryx, yeah it has
attributes of the traditional dinosaurs
in fact, that it has a physiology which
is very very similar to
Velociraptor, and to some of the small dromaeosaurs from China like Microraptor,
Troodon, and like Sinovenator, and so basically Archaeopteryx, which
most people will count as a bird is just
really a feathered dinosaur.
