Was Archaeopteryx secondary flightless?

[Derdadort]

Archaeopteryx seems to have the body of flightless bird. The biologist Michael Habib speculates, if it was secondary flightless.
What do you think?

www.nature.com/news/theory-suggests-iconic-early-bird-lost-its-flight-1.14142

[creature386]

Archaeopteryx not playing a central history in bird evolution (as said in that article) is not surprising to me. There are a few other possible avian ancestors which are a little bit older (I remember reading newspaper articles showing them).

IMO, Archaeopteryx was more closely related to the stem-avians. This paper seems to support my view:

Archaeopteryx, which has often been considered the earliest avialan, is an iconic species, central to our understanding of bird origins. However, a recent parsimony-based phylogenetic study shifted its position from within Avialae, the group that contains modern birds, to Deinonychosauria, the sister-taxon to Avialae. Subsequently, probability-based methods were applied to the same dataset, restoring Archaeopteryx to basal Avialae, suggesting these methods should be used more often in palaeontological studies. Here we review two key issues: arguments recently advocated for the usefulness of probability-based methodologies in the phylogenetic reconstruction of basal birds and their close relatives, and support for different phylogenetic hypotheses. Our analysis demonstrates that Archaeopteryx represents a challenging taxon to place in the phylogenetic tree, but recent discoveries of derived theropods including basal avialans provide increased support for the deinonychosaurian affinities of Archaeopteryx. Most importantly, we underscore that methodological choices should be based on the adequacy of the assumptions for particular kinds of data rather than on the recovery of preferred or generally accepted topologies, and that certain probability methods should be interpreted with caution as they can grossly overestimate character support.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14772019.2013.764357

[theropod]

It's fairly unlikely any of the known basal avialans is a direct ancestor of extant bird, most likely they are all more or less remote sidebranches (but some are likely quite close to the actual ancestors in direct line).

[creature386]

I know this, that's why I said possible ancestors.

[theropod]

What I meant is that you are right, we shouldn't be surprised by Archaeopteryx already representing a relatively derived sidebranch-member.

With a decent bunch of even older paravians and possibly even birds discovered by now, Habib's theory makes all the more sense.

[creature386]

This and it would be very strange if we discovered the grandfather of modern birds that early (Archaeopteryx is known for a really long time).

[theropod]

Yes, the probability to have found it that early is vanishingly low, even compared to the already very low probability of having found it at all (even with 150 more years of fossil collecting)