In a famous 1859 book, ‘On the Origin of Species’, the British naturalist Charles Darwin presented the world with the theory that life-forms evolved through natural selection.
A decade later, after he noticed that a bone in a turkey he was eating resembled a fossil of the theropod Megalosaurus that lay in his office, the anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley suggested that the birds of today could be the descendants of the extinct dinosaurs.
The proof of Huxley’s idea came a century later, yet some mysteries persisted as well. One was that both birds and dinosaurs have and had brains of a similar size – even as other parts of dinosaurs evolved to become smaller. The brain generates heat that needs to be moved away, so how did the smaller bird cranium manage this?
