Discovery Lunch is an opportunity to enjoy a sandwich during an accessible and popularised scientific lecture. All this can be enjoyed in the unique setting of this open-air conference room, with a breathtaking view over the Parc du Cinquantenaire.

Speaker: Pascal Godefroit, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

Topic: When chickens had teeth... dinosaurs had feathers.

In 1996, the discovery of Sinosauropteryx in China, in soil around 125 million years old, sent seismic waves through the world of palaeontology. The body of this small carnivorous dinosaur was indeed covered in down, confirming a hypothesis which certain palaeontologists have been defending for over a century: birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs and their closest relatives were small terrestrial predators close to the famous Velociraptor immortalised by Spielberg. The constraints created by flight in birds naturally required profound morphological and physiological adaptations compared with their dinosaur ancestors. All these characteristics didn’t develop simultaneously. On the contrary, we now know that certain adaptations (feathers, hollow bones, “wishbones,” etc.) first gradually evolved in certain dinosaurs, in which they were associated with non-flight functions: thermal insulation, mating parades, species recognition, etc. First appearing in the Jurassic period, (around 150 million years ago) the earliest “real” birds diversified very rapidly during the Lower Cretaceous, a period during which other anatomical adaptations directly linked to flight evolved. Thanks to new fossils discovered in China, and also in Canada, Europe and Siberia, we can now better understand the origin and diversification of Mesozoic birds, as well as the evolution of flight and plumage within the vast group of dinosaurs.

This conference is in French.