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.

Thanks a lot!

[nospam007]

So it's the fault of that asteroid that I have to listen to that damned mocking bird all night?

Re:Thanks a lot!

[Gavagai80]

Better than staying awake listening for a t-rex all night.

Re:Thanks a lot!

[Ol Olsoc]

Yeah, have you seen the way they eat? No manners, smacking their lips and making all those disgusting crunching sounds.

I think T-Rex's greatest survival strategy was they had to have a lot of Sex, because their arms were too short to masturbate.

Oh, have you not heard?

[jfdavis668]

It is my understanding that everyone had heard...

Re:Geographical location?

[gtall]

Unless them precursor birds hadn't yet figured out how to use their feathers to fly. Many dinosaurs had feathers about the time they went extinct but couldn't get off the ground due to weight, no traffic control, really bad transponders, etc. It was hard work to fly back then.

Re:Geographical location?

[Sique]

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.