“A bird didn’t just evolve from a T. rex overnight, but rather the classic features of birds evolved one by one; first bipedal locomotion, then feathers, then a wishbone, then more complex feathers that look like quill-pen feathers, then wings,” Brusatte said. “The end result is a relatively seamless transition between dinosaurs and birds, so much so that you can’t just draw an easy line between these two groups.”
Yet once those avian features were in place, birds took off. Brusatte’s study of coelurosaurs found that once archaeopteryx and other ancient birds emerged, they began evolving much more rapidly than other dinosaurs. The hopeful monster theory had it almost exactly backwards: A burst of evolution didn’t produce birds. Rather, birds produced a burst of evolution. “It seems like birds had happened upon a very successful new body plan and new type of ecology — flying at small size — and this led to an evolutionary explosion,” Brusatte said.
From the Wikipedia article on Eugene Francois Vidocq:By age fourteen, he had stolen a large amount of money from the cash box of his parent's bakery and left for Ostend, where he tried to embark to the Americas; but he was defrauded one night and found himself suddenly penniless. To survive, he worked for a group of traveling entertainers. Despite regular beatings, he worked hard enough to get promoted from stable boy to playing a Caribbean cannibal who eats raw meat. He could not stomach this for very long, so he switched to a group of puppeteers. However, he was banished from them because he flirted with the young wife of his employer. He then worked some time as an assistant of a pedlar, but as soon as he neared Arras, he returned to his parents seeking forgiveness. He was welcomed by his mother with open arms.
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