What are the origins of wings and tails in birds? This is one of the key questions in the evolution of animals. It has long been accepted that their evolution began in feathered dinosaurs.

What are the origins of wings and tails in birds? This is one of the key questions in the evolution of animals. It has long been accepted that their evolution began in feathered dinosaurs.

Some of these dinosaurs had feathers on the tails and small wing-like feathers on their forelimbs. These small wing-like structures called ‘proto-wings’ are composed of special feathers known as pennaceous feathers—the stiff feathers found in the wings and tails of birds.

The ancient form of these feathers first emerged in dinosaurs during the Jurassic Period, and these dinosaurs, called Pennaraptorans, had proto-wings made of pennaceous feathers. However, it has been known that these proto-wings were too small for powered flight. Because we cannot time-travel to observe their behavior, what dinosaurs did and how they behaved remains unanswered.

Various functions of proto-wings and tail feathers in the ancestors of birds have been considered since John Harold Ostrom proposed the first idea 50 years ago that proto-wings were used to knock down insect prey by small predatory dinosaurs living on the ground and following their prey. However, how the small ‘proto-wings’ and feathered tails helped the dinosaurian ancestors of birds in their lives has not been resolved.

  • GloomyEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    Eventually, the funding provided by Seoul National University allowed us to initiate our collaborative research and complete it with some additional funding. Finally, after facing multiple refusals from the Editorial Boards of 11 journals, each denying approval for a standard peer-review process of the paper, we finally found a journal that allowed our results to be peer-reviewed, which led to its publication," adds Piotr Jablonski.

    Could someone with as scientific background please explain to me as a layperson, why papers would refuse to peer review a study (or this study specifically)?

    • SalamanderAEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      What I understand this to mean is that the editorial staff of these journals rejected the paper.

      After the scientist decides to submit a paper for publication to a specific journal, the paper will first reach the editorial staff. The staff will look at the paper and assess whether they want to submit the paper to peer-review. At this stage they can reject the paper for a number of reasons - they may think that the research is not relevant enough to the journal’s focus, too narrow or too broad in scope, that it does not meet their quality standards in some metric, etc… This is a first filter.

      The editorial staff might have a scientific background but they are generally not experts in the specific field, and so a rejection at this stage does not necessarily reflect the quality of the underlying science which they might not be able to assess. That’s where peer-review comes in. If the editorial staff likes the paper, they will submit it to experts that should have experience specifically relevant to the research described in the paper for peer-review. This process consists of a back-and-forth between the authors and experts in the field, with the editorial staff acting as intermediaries. The editors will then take into consideration the back-and-forth between authors and peer-reviewers and they will determine whether to accept or reject the paper.

      You can look at an example of the description of this process from Nature here: https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/editorial-criteria-and-processes. Nature is an example of a high-impact journal that will usually reject papers if they deem them to be too narrow in scope, not novel enough, or if the paper does not meet a very high standard of quality.

      An especially relevant paragraph from this page is the following:

      The first stage for a newly submitted Article is that the editorial staff consider whether to send it for peer-review. On submission, the manuscript is assigned to an editor covering the subject area, who seeks informal advice from scientific advisors and editorial colleagues, and who makes this initial decision. The criteria for a paper to be sent for peer-review are that the results seem novel, arresting (illuminating, unexpected or surprising), and that the work described has both immediate and far-reaching implications. The initial judgement is not a reflection on the technical validity of the work described, or on its importance to people in the same field.

      • GloomyEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Thank you very much for taking the time to give this detailed of an explanation.