EDINBURGH, Scotland, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Scottish researchers say reconstructing the brains of extinct birds could provide clues to when they evolved into creatures of flight.
Scientists say overwhelming evidence suggests birds evolved from dinosaurs around 150 million years ago, but what is still unknown is exactly how such birds took to the air, LiveScience.com reported Thursday.
Researchers for National Museums Scotland are focusing on changes in the size of a part of the rear of the brain known as the flocculus, responsible for integrating visual and balance signals during flight, which allows birds to judge the position of other objects in mid-flight.
"We believe we can discover how the flocculus has evolved to deal with different flying abilities, giving us new information about when birds first evolved the power of flight," Stig Walsh, senior curator of vertebrate palaeobiology, says.
Investigators are scanning fossils of a half-dozen extinct species and the skulls of roughly 100 modern birds in great detail.
For the modern birds, the researchers "are particularly interested in species that are closely related where there are flying and flightless examples, such as cormorants, pigeons, parrots and ducks," Walsh said.
This could reveal whether the flocculus becomes smaller with the loss of flight, he said.
