Modern Early Birds Evolved Long Before The Dinosaurs Went Extinct
Modern birds evolved earlier than previously assumed — much earlier than the dinosaurs’ mass extinction — an event that seems to have had a limited impact on avian evolution
Artist’s depiction of the genesis of modern birds during the Late Cretaceous Epoch, portraying their coexistence with dinosaurs and their resilience through the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction. (Credit: Shaoyuan Wu)
When did modern birds first appear on Earth? Scientists assumed that modern birds appeared around the time that the dinosaurs went extinct after an asteroid crashed into Earth 66 million years ago. Even though this collision caused the extinction of three out of four species alive on the planet at the time, birds as a group did not go extinct. In fact, palaeontologists have long argued that the asteroid impact triggered a large pulse of bird evolution presumably because it eliminated a lot of competition for birds, giving them the opportunity to evolve into the remarkable diversity of species that we see today.
But a new study by an international team of researchers reports that modern birds began diversifying tens of millions of years before the asteroid strike, suggesting that the asteroid strike had no major effect on bird evolution. This discovery, based on extensive mining and analysis of genomic data collected from 124 species of birds representing most of modern bird diversity, reports that birds date back much further than previously thought.
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