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.

Comments

Different Interpretation

[VernonNemitz]

We know that the dinosaur group filled most of the world's ecological niches, and when the Chicxulub event happened, a vast number of niches had their occupants wiped out. All we need do is assume that for any species, there is a reasonably constant mutation rate, and most mutants won't survive when there are better-adapted competitors already in a given ecological niche. If the mutant can find a different niche, though, then its chance of survival goes up a lot. So, no need to assume a "burst of evolution" when the simpler explanation is a "burst of opened opportunities", thanks to all those wiped-out competitors.