Meet Limusaurus. It is not–I repeat NOT–the missing link between anything. And yet it is still an important fossil that may help us understand how birds evolved from dinosaurs.

The recent splash about a certain fossil primate has revealed yet again just how much a lot of people (sadly, including a lot of journalists) want to cling to the notion that paleontologists are only interested in missing links–which, I guess, are supposed to be the direct ancestors of some living group of organisms that are precisely halfway between primitive forerunners and the advanced living creatures.

This notion is wrong in many ways. First of all, the entire body plan shared by, say, living birds did not leap into existence in a