Riversleigh is located in North-West of Queensland and is Australia's most famous fossil site. The 100 km² area has fossil remains of ancient mammals, birds and reptiles. Some of the most unusual and remarkable animals in the Australian fossil record have been found at Riversleigh. There are more than 250 fossil sites at Riversleigh, hundreds of new species have been described from thousands of well-preserved specimens, some up to 25 million years old. It is the only known place in the world that has such a combination of richness, detail and continuity. Fossils at Riversleigh are found in limestone by lime-rich freshwater pools, and in caves, when the ecosystem was evolving from rich rainforest to semi-arid grassland community. The fossil …show more content…
There is a theory of birds to be dinosaurs as they have continued to evolve into a high number of species. Dinosaurs walked the Earth for an incredible 165 million years. They first appeared in the late Triassic Period and became the largest land animals to have ever lived.

The statement is true is the sense that many scientists believed birds formed from dinosaurs, like how humans evolved from apes. Dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. Evidence proves that there was a giant asteroid that smashed into the Earth, leaving a crater nearly 200km wide. This kicked dust and debris up into the atmosphere which darkened the planet for months and wiped out the dinosaurs, causing a huge decline in primitive birds. For a long time, the only half-dinosaur, half-bird animal known was the Archaeopteryx. However, in the last twenty years a huge number of new fossils have been discovered. Recent fossil discoveries have largely convinced experts that some dinosaurs didn’t die out at all. Instead a particular group of small, agile, two-legged dinosaurs evolved into birds. Feathers are thought to have evolved from the scales of the theropod dinosaur’s reptilian skin. The evolution of birds from their theropod dinosaur ancestors is now thought to have begun in the late Jurassic Period, around 200-145 million years ago. Numerous …show more content…
In 1996, Feduccia investigated an intriguing bird which lived around 135 million years ago, just after Archaeopteryx. The Liaoningornis bird did not look like a dinosaur bird at all, as it has similar features to that of a modern bird. Feduccia believes that birds were very widespread and were occupying a variety of habitats. Some evolutionists claim that feathers evolved from scales but scales are folds in skin and feathers are a complex structures of barbs, barbules, and hooks, which could not evolve to change from one to the other. Scientist have also discovered many differences between dinosaurs and birds as reptiles have different lung systems to birds and also unlike all mammals and reptiles, bird femurs are tucked up into the