Macroevolutionary patterns in Avialae (Dinosauria: Theropoda)

• Applicant: Dr. Christian Foth
• Subject Area: Palaeontology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 574114003

Crown birds (Aves) are one of the most remarkable groups of vertebrates that origin reaches back to the Late Cretaceous. Representing the only dinosaur clade to survive the K-Pg mass extinction, they reached a high level of taxonomic, morphological and ecological diversity. However, the evolutionary history of birds reaches back into the Late Jurassic and is usually associated with the Urvogel Archaeopteryx from Germany, although most of our today’s knowledge of early bird evolution is based on the fossils from the Early Cretaceous of China. In the past, various phylogenetic and macroevolutionary studies have been applied to this group that is called Avialae. However, most of these studies lack a proper sample of non-avialan outgroup taxa and crown group members. This bias has a crucial impact for the understanding the origin of Avialae and the survivorship of the crown group at the end of the Cretaceous. The overall objective of this proposal is to create a phylogenetic dataset of skeletal morphology for Avialae including a large sample of non-avialan coelurosaurian theropods and (extinct and extant) crown group members. Besides the exploration of avialan phylogeny, the dataset will be the source for different kind of macroevolutionary analyses (patterns of morphological disparity, rate evolution and homoplasy). The project aims to address the following questions: • How did the morphological disparity of Avialae change over time and do different anatomical regions share the same evolution of disparity. • How are different anatomical regions integrated with each other? • Are there periods with accelerated or decelerated evolution and do they coincidence with origin of certain clades or major ecological transitions? • Did different body regions or ecological traits evolve at different rates? • How strong is bird evolution characterized by homoplasy and how is homoplasy related to disparity? • Is the survivorship of modern birds across the K-Pg event random or selective and are there phenotypic traits that explain survivorship? The primary methods that will be applied to tackle these questions include morphological comparisons, disparity and rate analyses in combination with different phylogenetic methods, cladistics and principal coordinate analyses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: China (Hong Kong), United Kingdom
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Sylke Frahnert; Professor Dr. Jörg Fröbisch; Dr. Daniela Schwarz
• Cooperation Partners: Juan Benito Moreno, Ph.D.; Professor Daniel Field, Ph.D.; Professor Michael Pittman, Ph.D.