 However, due to the cogent evidence provided by comparative anatomy and phylogenetics, as well as the dramatic feathered dinosaur fossils from China, the idea that birds are derived dinosaurs, first championed by Huxley and later by Nopcsa and Ostrom, enjoys near-unanimous support among today's paleontologists.A 2011 publication suggested that selection for the expansion of skeletal muscle, rather than the evolution of flight, was the driving force for the emergence of this clade.Muscles became larger in prospectively endothermic saurians, according to this hypothesis, as a response to the loss of the vertebrate mitochondrial uncoupling protein, UCP1, which is thermogenic.