ArticleScience advances2020
Shrinking dinosaurs and the evolution of endothermy in birds.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Parental investment and body temperature explain encephalization in vertebrates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- When the lung invades: a review of avian postcranial skeletal pneumaticity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- On the origins of endothermy in amniotes.iScience · 2024Article
- A century of exercise physiology: concepts that ignited the study of human thermoregulation. Part 4: evolution, thermal adaptation and unsupported theories of thermoregulation.European journal of applied physiology · 2024Review
- Gaze following in Archosauria-Alligators and palaeognath birds suggest dinosaur origin of visual perspective taking.Science advances · 2023Article
- Evidence for heterothermic endothermy and reptile-like eggshell mineralization inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Orthologous microsatellites, transposable elements, and DNA deletions correlate with generation time and body mass in neoavian birds.Science advances · 2022Article
- Article
- Strategies for Hypothermia Compensation in Altricial and Precocial Newborn Mammals and Their Monitoring by Infrared Thermography.Veterinary sciences · 2022Review
- Whole-body endothermy: ancient, homologous and widespread among the ancestors of mammals, birds and crocodylians.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures.Nature communications · 2021Article
- The Genomes of Two Billfishes Provide Insights into the Evolution of Endothermy in Teleosts.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Molecular phyloecology suggests a trophic shift concurrent with the evolution of the first birds.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Energetic mechanisms for coping with changes in resource availability.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of endothermy represents a major transition in vertebrate history, yet how and why endothermy evolved in birds and mammals remains controversial. Here, we combine a heat transfer model with theropod body size data to reconstruct the evolution of metabolic rates along the bird stem lineage. Results suggest that a reduction in size constitutes the path of least resistance for endothermy to evolve, maximizing thermal niche expansion while obviating the costs of elevated energy requirements. In this scenario, metabolism would have increased with the miniaturization observed in the Early-Middle Jurassic (~180 to 170 million years ago), resulting in a gradient of metabolic levels in the theropod phylogeny. Whereas basal theropods would exhibit lower metabolic rates, more recent nonavian lineages were likely decent thermoregulators with elevated metabolism. These analyses provide a tentative temporal sequence of the key evolutionary transitions that resulted in the emergence of small, endothermic, feathered flying dinosaurs.
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