this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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Waka waka (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (3 children)

In case anyone genuinely has this misconception: birds branched off from the other dinosaurs during the Jurassic, probably over 100 million years before the astroid hit. Dinos didn’t suddenly grow feathers and a beak because a big rock hit them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It would be cool though, if they did

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Now my head cannon is that's exactly what happened.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I did not know this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Interesting! Have we identified the last common ancestor of all modern birds yet? Or at least an estimate of when it would have lived?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It seems quite a few modern birds (Aves) lineages survived the K-Pg extinction (at least 5, last I checked), but when exactly they diversified is apparently still a contentious issue. The common ancestor almost definitely lived sometime during the cretaceous, so not THAT long ago in the grand scheme of things, but it definitely lived either before or during T-rex’s reign.

I was referring to Avialae, which is the clade defined as all dinosaurs more closely related to budgies than to deinonychus. Many of them would have seemed quite birdy to us, but like the other dinosaurs not many of them made it to the current day and the ones that did are all Aves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

It seems quite a few modern birds (Aves) lineages survived the K-Pg extinction (at least 5, last I checked)

Cool! Do we know how modern birds relate to these 5 lineages? (i.e. which branch became sparrows, ducks, ostriches, etc.?)