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Asteroid Impact Helped Create the Birds We Know Today (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Every bird alive today can trace its ancestry to creatures that lived about 95 million years ago on a chunk of land that split off from the supercontinent Gondwana, a new study suggests. The new family tree, compiled using information from fossils and from genetic analyses of modern birds, also reveals that this lineage underwent a major burst of evolution after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago and killed off the rest of their dinosaurian kin.
1. 1% of dinos could fly.
2. Asteroid hit earth
3. 99.9% of dinos died
4. 100% of all dinos can fly.
5. ??
6. BIRDIES!
If you read the last paragraph of the article, you find a more detailed picture. There were already birds populating all other continents before the KT event, the Enantiornithes. But they died out together with the other dinosaurs. It was just the population of the western gondwana island, that survived, already split into the main groups of birds we know today, and from there those groups conquered the continents and radiated into all the different species of birds we know today.