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.