Bird of prey and may be raised to an order of their own, Cathartiiformes. The secretary bird and/or osprey are sometimes listed as subfamilies of Acciptridae: Sagittariinae and Pandioninae, respectively. Australia's letter-winged kite is a member of the family Accipitridae, although it is a nocturnal bird. The nocturnal birds of prey – the owls – are classified separately as members of two extant families of the order Strigiformes: Below is a simplified phylogeny of Telluraves which is the clade where the birds of prey belong to along with passerines and several near-passerine lineages. The orders in bold text are birds of prey orders;
Origin of birds flight, in which developing wing structures served as a sort of parachute. Second, they achieved active flight by flapping the wings. He used "Archaeopteryx" as an example of this second stage. Finally, birds gained the ability to soar. Current thought is that feathers did not evolve from scales, as feathers are made of different proteins. More seriously, Nopcsa's theory assumes that feathers evolved as part of the evolution of flight, and recent discoveries prove that assumption is false. Feathers are very common in coelurosaurian dinosaurs (including the early tyrannosauroid "Dilong"). Modern birds are classified as coelurosaurs by nearly all palaeontologists,