Zhonghe Zhou, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 

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Work description: 

In 1868, Thomas Huxley proposed that birds originated from dinosaurs，an idea that remained controversial for over a century. In the 1970s, John Ostrom revived this hypothesis, and further proposed that birds evolved from a small coelurosaurian dinosaur. A major breakthrough came in the 1990s when Qiang Ji and the late Piji Chen independently reported the first feathered dinosaur fossils recovered from northeastern China. This discovery was followed by a series of transitional species from dinosaurs to birds unearthed and studied by Xing Xu and Zhonghe Zhou. Through rigorous phylogenetic analyses, anatomical studies, and functional inferences, they established the morphological and functional links between dinosaurs and birds, and provided definitive evidence for birds being an evolutionary branch of theropod dinosaurs. Their work provided definitive evidence that birds are living descendants of theropod dinosaurs and  transformed a long-standing debate into a widely accepted scientific theory, reshaping our understanding of vertebrate evolution.

Qiang Ji was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1951. He graduated from the Department of Geology, Nanjing University.

Xing Xu was born in Xinjiang, China, in 1969. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2002.

Zhonghe Zhou was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1965. He received his Ph.D. from University of Kansas in 1999.